Profiile: Stanley Baxter - A barra of laughs

IT WAS A TYPICAL Stanley Baxter remark. "This is all about me!" he complained in horror to Alan Cumming, the Hollywood darling and Perthshire native with whom Baxter was shown in conversation last night on BBC2. "What about you? You're the big star."

For the 83 year old, whose personal life has remained as opaque as the openly bisexual Cumming's has been transparent, it was a revealing moment. Always willing to play the dame, the fool or the impressionist, the man affectionately known as Scotland's transvestite-in-chief does not, it is clear, like people to pry too far or peer too closely. No wonder he once complained to an interviewer: "All this rubbish about the man behind the mask. I've had it again and again and again. The mask is what's important."

In a career that spans nine decades Baxter has donned many masks, the first of which was handed to him by his strong, dominant mother. The boy from Maryhill was just seven when he started performing in church halls across Glasgow, with his mother thumping along on the piano and egging him on to do impressions of the big stars of the day – including glamorous women such as Mae West.

"I probably became an entertainer to please mother," he said once. "She was forthright, while father was a retiring man. I was more like him, in nature, but to please her I pushed myself forward."

His father worked at Commercial Union Insurance Company – a thoroughly nice, thoroughly shy man whose family was, according to his mother, "all kirky", which his mother refused to tolerate. As a result, he says, his mother didn't want him to get too close to his father, in case he too became "all kirky".

Whether the personal shyness that has followed Baxter all the way through his life was inherited from his father is moot, but it is certainly true that he overcame any stage fright early on, falling headlong in love with the business of show and particularly in making people laugh. By the time he reached his teens he was running all the way from Hillhead High School to the BBC's old Scottish HQ in Glasgow's Queen Margaret Drive in order to take part in Children's Hour, where he played the role of various boy heroes.

When he was called up for National Service at the end of the war he worked as part of the Combined Services Entertainment unit, where he met a young, rather camp man named Kenneth Williams. They devised an act, sparking a lifelong friendship. Those who have seen it say that, even today, Baxter can do a Williams impression that would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Indeed, if it weren't for Baxter, it is likely that Williams, another man always reticent about his private life, would never have made a career out of performing. After active service, Williams returned to his old job of map making. Baxter, recognising his talent, bullied him into placing adverts in The Stage and writing to repertory companies, as a result of which Williams got his first break, with a small theatre company in Newquay. Meanwhile, after the army, Baxter went to Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre, at the time a groundbreaking institution, where he spent several happy years immersing himself in acting, directing and stage managing (often at the light entertainment end of the theatrical scale).

In 1952, Baxter married Moira, whom he had met playing Little Red Riding Hood at the Citizens. She had, as he described it once, "a long history of emotional problems", and though he was clearly fond of her, they lived apart for the last 16 years before her death in 1997 and never had children.

"It was very difficult to live with someone so troubled," he once said. "She was always fragile, somewhat ethereal, and she became very confused as the years passed." Although he left, he visited her every day until her death, a period of his life he describes as "a very dark time".

Baxter defected from Scotland to London in the mid-1950s, taking on parts in theatre and films with the likes of Bill Travers and Julie Christie. Then came the eponymous TV shows – extravagant, lavishly produced programmes that became, as his friend Victoria Wood once described them, "an event" in households across the nation, routinely racking up 20 million viewers.

Here was the Baxter the nation adored – dressed up in drag to do a spot-on Joan Bakewell or a nail-on-the-head Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra or, sometimes, just as an excuse to put on a leotard and show off those fabulous legs.

His accents, too, were faultless, a skill perhaps best demonstrated in his famous Parliamo Glasgow sketches, where he could switch seamlessly from RP English to down-the-back-of-the-close Glaswegian ("Izat a marra on yer barra, Clara?") in the blink of an eye.

He credits his ability to take on so many characters to the fact that the real Stanley Baxter was, once more, curled up behind one of those many masks.

"I was able to do that because I had never truly courted celebrity," he claimed once. "It found me, of course. When the show carries your name, it is inevitable. However, I was never one for the parties, the warm white wine and paper plates of rubbishy titbits."

His show finished after a falling out with TV executive John Birt, who sacked him at ITV for costing the network too much money, only for Baxter to take his show to the BBC and find Birt pop up there not long afterwards. But he continued to do panto, an art form he adores, as well as the children's programme Mr Majeika, until his retirement in 1991.

"When I activated my private pension at the age of 64, my insurance person said, 'But what will you do?'" he once said. "It was as if my life had ended. 'I will do exactly what I want,' I told him, and that is what I have done. It's not strangeness, just contentment."

Today he lives quietly in north London. He has a villa in the Mediterranean where he spends June and September and, when he's back in London, he goes swimming, goes to the pictures, and watches Frasier or Curb Your Enthusiasm on TV.

One day, Baxter has said, there will be revelations, although he has no intention of being around to hear them. He has strictly enforced the rule that his biography, on which he has been co-operating for several years, will be posthumous, "because then it can't touch me any more".

He remarked once that people will be surprised by "some of the more intimate stuff". Still, he maintains that it is what is in front of the mask, rather than behind it, that matters.

"The important things in my life were all to do with the business. It's only the professional life that has been of any importance. The rest has all been quite dark."

From this coy, complex and utterly individual man, it is another highly typical remark.