I can't remember whether my parents put the woman right. I like to think that they didn't.
I knew from the age of three that I never wanted to become an actor myself. At Christmas I dreaded charades, a game at which everyone else in my family excelled. Having no desire to stand out from the crowd, I kept quiet about my parents' work when I started school. It helped that my father acted under the name of Jeremy Brett, and my mother under her maiden name, Anna Massey.
It also helped that I was in the same class as the son of a producer of the James Bond films. Thanks to his father, Salzman Jr acquired 007 toys months before they were available in the shops. Among classmates, then, my own background seemed happily drab by comparison. My mother was a working single parent, but she mostly acted in the theatre in the evenings so we could spend the days together, and she turned jobs down if they conflicted with school holidays. My father took me out every weekend, and we'd often visit actor friends who had children of my age.
There was a degree of camaraderie among the offspring of actors, and I soon came to appreciate my own parents' relative normality. The son of one comedy actor had a seemingly enviable existence - running wild and unschooled, zooming around on a motorbike at 14 and smoking marijuana - though, in retrospect, it looks a nightmare.
When my father presented me with a motorbike for my 18th birthday, my parents happened to be working together on a television adaptation of Rebecca. My mother was so angry with him that they ignored each other for the entire filming. At the time, I took my father's side, but now my sympathies lie more with my mother. It was the first time they'd fallen out openly, and the row pinpointed the fact that they were, by nature, opposites. My mother is cerebral, cautious and organised, while my father was intuitive and impulsive. I suspect that the easy rapport they seemed to share when I was a child might be due to the fact that they were professional actors as well as caring parents. I can still hear them battling out their differences in my head: my father urging me to take risks; my mother advising me to think things through.
My maternal grandfather had lived in Los Angeles ever since I was born, and when I was a teenager my father also bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. Understudying my own adulthood in the buttoned-up half-light of 1970s London, Los Angeles looked like a Technicolor paradise. Low-riders cruised Sunset Strip. You could still smoke in bars and restaurants. And when people said "Have a nice day", they meant it. They were "laid back". An English accent retained its novelty value, but after several visits, I learned to lay back a little myself.
At Christmas, scaled-down Santa sleighs, reindeer and polystyrene snow decorated front lawns in 70-degree heat. Just along the road from my grandfather's house, Rodeo Drive teemed with rhinestone- encrusted stetsons, and women in leopard-skin leotards. LA may have been given to excess, but it was also liberal and unselfconscious, the fastest-growing city in the world, portrayed as a melting pot of post-Watts racial harmony - a model for the cities of the 21st century.
A visit to my cousin Nathaniel at his film school in Santa Barbara made university life in England seem very unappealing. Nathaniel windsurfed every afternoon (a recent innovation), drove a convertible, and lived in a condo beside the beach with his blonde girlfriend. In stark contrast to Cambridge, nobody ever seemed to have a head cold in southern California, and everybody had a tan.
Even then, though, LA was the world capital of narcissism. Strolling on Santa Monica pier one winter's day, my father and I were surprised by Vincent Price and his wife Coral Browne emerging, preening and silver-tongued, from the fog. Another time, on Hollywood Boulevard, we pulled up alongside a pearl-grey sports car barely big enough to contain the bleached, back-combed mane of David Lee Roth. One glimpse of the Van Halen singer staring fixedly ahead, eyebrows creased as the tourists gawked, made it clear that he carried the same virus as Charles Bronson: self-obsession.
Soon after leaving university, when I was starting work as an illustrator and cartoonist, my grandfather died. My father returned to Britain to portray Sherlock Holmes on TV; my mother produced and starred in Hotel du Lac, then fell in love with and married my stepfather Uri Andres, a professor of metallurgy. I went on to write two novels.