Little more than four years ago, Tony Slattery was one of the most famous faces in TV comedy, but then his life went tragically wrong. The star of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and the movie Peter's Friends just went off the rails.

Lost in an oblivion of vodka and cocaine, he became bankrupt both financially and emotionally. Locked away in his converted warehouse overlooking the Thames, friends and bailiffs hammered on the door as the reclusive star threw his furniture into the river. Finally, he reached the depths of despair.

"It was either out for keeps or in with a fresh start," he says. "I was at saturation level. I couldn't have slipped any lower. If I went 'out' - if I topped myself - then that would be a relief.

"But I couldn't bear the thought of the pain I would leave behind. It's not courageous to take your own life, it's cowardly. I didn't want to leave those I love - who had shown me so much kindness - grieving. So, that morning about a year ago, I made the decision to live. I wanted to go on, to achieve something. Also I was broke. I wondered what I'd been doing, there had been so much waste. It is so easy to hate yourself. Now I'm learning to love. It's tricky, but I'm getting there."

Ironically, it as the death of his father after a lingering illness that gave Tony back the will to live. It is the main reason he is still here today and making a comeback in the British film The Wedding Tackle this week.

Although he has been to his own private hell and back you wouldn't know it by looking at him. Sitting in the suite of a West End hotel, his smart clothes have touches of his individual style - a flashy shirt he picked up in San Tropez is highlighted by strokes of an artist's brush. His dark hair is swept back off his face, and he wears the brown rosary beads that once belonged to his beloved dad. To his right is a tumbler of fizzy water and a Bloody Mary.

There is a slightly manic air about him but then Tony, who has just turned 40, has always felt like something of an outsider, as if he had to make an extra effort to fit in.

He was the lad from the wrong side of the tracks - a council estate in Willesden, North London - thrust into a world of wealth and privilege at Cambridge University, where he read modern and medieval languages. There he shared the Footlights stage with Stephen Fry, Huge Laurie, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. In 1992, Branagh cast him in Peter's Friends as an over-sexed womaniser. In reality, there was nobody special in Tony's life. Then or now.

At the same time he found fame as a regular on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and also trod the boards. Before he cracked up he was also starring in the critically-acclaimed West End play Neville's Island.

The first inkling that he was losing control was his outburst at the televised Olivier Awards in April 1995. He was there to warm up the audience but he abused them instead. He told the celebrity gathering that one critic in the stalls was, "so ugly she had to force her way into theatres". Another was, "so fat" he needed doors widening for him.

"There are people, were people, out there who hated me and I'm not surprised," he reflects today. "I was over-exposed. I was being smarmy, oily, and occasionally funny. I had some moments on Whose Line Is It Anyway? but viewers must have been getting sick of me.

"I thought it would all end at any moment so I took on almost any old rubbish. It didn't make me happy or get me to Hollywood... Still, things are doing well now. I've done a radio series with David Nobbs, a date at the Comedy Store and been to Tennessee to interview Dolly Parton for a glossy magazine. I want to do different things, not be good old predictable Tony Slattery doing every other game show on daytime telly. I have publishers chasing me to write something. Most of all, I have hope."

At one time hope was the last thing he had. Tony still lives in the home near London Bridge where he went into "hiding" for three years. In one manic moment he chucked his furniture into the Thames, including his fridge. During his rockiest spells he survived on cocaine and amphetamines, starting his day with two bottle of vodka.

"Self-loathing took over," he says. "I was out of control. Maybe I was lonely. Maybe I'd lost all sense of direction. I was like something out of a horror film. I wasn't looking after myself - even my family sensed that. The bailiffs would turn up and I'd pay the odd bill to make them go away. Friends who'd given up waiting for me to return their calls eventually knocked down the door. They were sickened by what they found.

"Before I retreated, I was doing ten grams of cocaine a day and partying at Stringfellows. I'd worked non-stop for 13 years and had all this money to blow so i was. 'Let's parteee... there's a girl... there's a boy'. I was in toxic delirium entering various stages of exotic psychosis."

Eventually he checked into a private clinic but claims he was given the wrong medication. "I considered The Priory but it would be, 'How are you, darling - kissy kissy', in every corridor. I'd meet people I knew and be back on the stuff in no time," he says. "Instead I found this excellent psychiatrist. He said, 'You are not a well man. I don't want to be your friend, don't try to be mine. I just want to help you. Go home and think about that and we'll take it from there'. And we did."

Then family tragedy overshadowed his self-inflicted problems. His Irish dad Michael died last year, aged 75, after a long battle with cancer. At the end, the former factory worker weighed little more than three stone.

"We had a Macmillan nurse and, blow me, she had seen it all, but near the end even she was in the corner weeping," recalls Tony. "Dad was in strange state - he had been showing great agitation, pain and confusion. The doctor was giving him diamorphine and I was saying, 'You must give him more'. The doctor said he'd die if he gave him much more. I said if he didn't do what I asked I'd put a pillow over dad's head. This wasn't living, this was dying in pain and there's a big difference. Dad had been ill for years and enough was enough. Our nurse said, 'You are not prolonging his life, you are prolonging his illness'. She was absolutely right.

"Thankfully, he went very quickly after that. But I was glad I had been there. To hold my mother's hand. After that, it would have been to terrible if I had caused her more grief. She had suffered enough."

He smiles and adds, "Oh, Lord, I sound so tragic, don't I? Please don't make this 'the joy through the tears' stuff. I want to put that period when I held hands with the Devil behind me. I want to get on with my life. I don't want sympathy - I don't deserve it."

He drew comfort from his Catholic family. He has an older sister Marlene and triplet brothers, Stephen, Michael and Christopher, and regularly visits his mum Margaret.

"She says, 'Now don't you be going down those London clubs, they're full of drug addicts and bad people'," he chuckles, mimicking his mum's Irish brogue. "She is wonderful."

Tony's climb back to sanity and health is crowned with his career comeback in The Wedding Tackle, a comedy of sexual manners about which he is refreshingly candid.

"I've never had a hit film and I'm not a movie star," he says. "I'm not box office. I go to bed praying that it will be all right and, who knows, it might be. It was great fun to make - like a british version of War Of The Roses. It is sour and black, full of deceit and betrayal and sexual game-playing.

"At a preview the audience laughed when they were supposed to and I thought, 'Yeah!' I know when people see it they will say, 'Isn't that Tony Slattery? Didn't he die of a smack overdose? He's funny though - it must be his twin!' Look, it won't make me an international star but it's a start."

The film co-stars Amanda Redman, Adrian Dunbar, Leslie Grantham, James Purefoy and Victoria Smurfit. In it Tony plays Little Ted, a cartoonist madly in love with a girl who's about to marry someone else. Perhaps, like Little Ted, a long-term partner would be the key to Tony's happiness.

"I'm much less close to that after having gone mad," he replies. "I can't commit - I'll have to move to a house with a garden and have some kind of normality before that can happen. I still need to sort myself out to make way for a companion."

"A cousin died the other day, just a child. They put this tiny coffin into the ground and I thought, 'What am I worrying about? What are my problems? There is a lot of madness and horror in the world. Get on with your life!'

"I miss my dad. I often think, 'Sorry, dad, if I've let you down. I will try harder'. I've had an escape, a narrow escape, but I'm still here and that's what counts."

(Thanks to Ferasong for sharing this article.)