Rob Lowe: Highs and Lowes

Rob Lowe announces his presence as he walks into the hotel bar by shouting across the room to order his coffee. "What I need is a double ESPRESSO! With some steamed milk ON THE SIDE!"

Lowe eases himself into a semicircular leather chair with a rubbery smile on his face. "IT'S MY ACTOR'S VOICE!" he yells at me before segueing seamlessly into an explanation of how he learned to project his voice during a recent stint in the London stage production of A Few Good Men. And then, realising that I am British, Lowe switches on the charm.

"I love London," he says wistfully. "I just bought a coffee-table book of great London restaurants, and I read it and it made me so homesick."

Homesick? How long was he there for?

"I lived there for six months," he continues smoothly. "Even though it was only six months, it felt like home. We lived in Belgravia — it was beautiful. On Eaton Terrace," he says, enunciating the street name slowly.

At the age of 45, he is wearing a Springsteen-esque grey T-shirt patriotically emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and faded blue jeans that are a shade too stonewashed. He has three chunky beaded bracelets that resemble something a gap-year student would pick up from a Kathmandu market stall.

Perhaps these outward manifestations of youthfulness are not entirely surprising for an actor who was catapulted into the limelight when barely out of his teenage years with roles such as Billy, the saxophone-playing rebel with big hair and a crucifix earring in 1985's St Elmo's Fire.

'80s poster boy

His early roles in films such as Francis Ford Coppola's coming-of-age classic The Outsiders (1983) and the 1984 comedy Oxford Blues made him into a pin-up. Lowe became the 1980s poster boy, partying hard with his co-stars and dating the requisite beautiful women. He also developed a drink problem and a rumoured sex addiction that led to rehab.

It all imploded in 1988. While campaigning on behalf of Michael Dukakis at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, Lowe picked up two female fans in a nightclub and took them back to his hotel, where he filmed them having a threesome. A year later the mother of one of the girls (who turned out to be 16 and therefore underage according to state law) pressed charges against Lowe.

Would he make the same mistakes if he lived his life again? "I would do everything the same." There is a silence. Why? "If you go back in time to try to change things, you could end up changing the future, and I like where I am in my life. I love my life, I'm really grateful for the things I have, and if I did something different it wouldn't turn out this way."

The video became one of the first commercially available sex tapes, distributed for £25 (Dh146) a throw by the porn baron Al Goldstein. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream roles dried up.

For a while Lowe appeared in smaller films before a stint on Saturday Night Live introduced him to comedian Mike Myers. Discovering a hitherto untapped gift for comedy, Lowe appeared alongside Myers in Wayne's World (1992) and was later cast in two Austin Powers films.

But it was his role as the White House deputy communications officer Sam Seaborn in The West Wing that cemented Lowe's post-St Elmo's reputation.

Lowe admits now that part of the attraction was playing a role that more or less ignored his appearance.

Although he played a Democrat in West Wing, he turned right-wing for his role as Republican senator Robert McAllister in Brothers & Sisters. It is a political trajectory that has mirrored his own — once a card-carrying Democrat, Lowe campaigned to make Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California in 2003.

Taking himself seriously

His latest film, The Invention of Lying, is a return to comedy. Directed and written by Ricky Gervais, it is set in a world where people are incapable of not telling the truth. Lowe appears as Gervais' shallow and self-satisfied love rival for the affections of Anna (Jennifer Garner), a man who prides himself on his genetic superiority.

"It's a deconstruction of the cinema archetype of the good-looking guy," Lowe explains. Does he enjoy poking fun at his own reputation for disproportionate handsomeness? "In comedy, you have to be willing to not take yourself seriously, you know? I take comedy really seriously and so to take comedy seriously, you must not, you cannot, ever take yourself seriously."

And yet he seems not to realise that he does take himself extremely seriously, even when the subject matter is ripe for fun. "I saw People magazine had a list of the top 10 teen idols of all time, and I'm on that list with Elvis, with James Dean, Michael Jackson," he says. "I mean, I have to say I'm proud of that. It's cool." He pauses, as if better to appreciate the monumental nature of this achievement. "And there's some of the new guys on it like Robert Pattinson, Zac Efron... Those guys are carrying on the mantle."

The mantle of what exactly? Defined jawbones and tight trousers?

He seems to have become so used to acting the part of Rob Lowe that he speaks as though he is playing the role of charming interviewee, talking in a mixture of fortune-cookie homilies and beauty-pageant answers. "I'm a people person," he insists with a glossy smile that does not reach his eyes.

Lowe seems not really to engage beyond this therapy-speak or, indeed, to have any desire to do so. One is left with the impression that he has been told so frequently that he is charismatic and hilarious that he no longer feels he has to make an effort.

At the age of eight, Lowe saw a theatrical production of Oliver! and decided he wanted "to be one of those kids up there [on stage]". His mother's third husband worked in Los Angeles, so Rob and his younger brother Chad moved to Malibu. It was a dislocating experience for Lowe, who did not surf and had never seen the ocean.

Yet life in California came with some compensations — at Santa Monica High School his contemporaries included Penn, Robert Downey Jr and the Sheens. He was friends with Cary Grant's daughter Jennifer.

Lowe was 19 when Coppola cast him in The Outsiders alongside Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon, so the entirety of his adult life has been played out in the celebrity spotlight. In 1991 he married make-up artist Sheryl Berkoff, who had dated his best friend Emilio Estevez — all terribly incestuous in a glamorous, Hollywood sort of way.

Berkoff was instrumental in getting Lowe sober, and they now live on a ranch in Montecito, California, with their sons, Matthew, 16, and 13-year-old John Owen.

He describes himself as sentimental: "You know what you say: you scratch a cynic and you find a sentimentalist. Because nobody's more cynical than me."

In April 2008 Lowe filed separate lawsuits against three former employees, including his children's nanny, Jessica Gibson. The cases were settled out of court in May.

Did that experience make him wary of people? "No," is all he will say about this. Is his cynicism a means of protecting himself from getting hurt? "I think so." He glances at me sideways, and for a second the smile slips. "I don't think it's conscious, but I'll buy that."

As it turns out, I am unable to pursue this line of questioning. A PR comes in to tell me that Lowe has to leave immediately for a premiere. I protest that no one had told me the interview would be so dramatically curtailed. Lowe stays silent. Later I'm informed by e-mail that our interview was stopped because I had mentioned the nanny lawsuit. Apparently all journalists were meant to have been issued with a list of topics that were not to be discussed except, of course, I was never given any such list. And even if he disliked the question, is it beyond the realms of credibility to assume that a 45-year-old man would be capable of saying he did not want to answer it?

Living forever

To his credit, Lowe agrees to a catch-up phone interview. When we talk three days later, he sounds less stilted. Maybe because I cannot see his face, he feels released from the necessity of Being Rob Lowe. Since our meeting, Patrick Swayze, his Outsiders co-star, has died of pancreatic cancer. "He was like a brother to me," Lowe says. The loss of his friend seems to have made him reflective and prompts him to say something extremely telling: "One of the great gifts that we get [as actors] is that we live on, frozen in time, forever."

Is that why he does it? "It is. Truly, the most fulfilling moments I've ever had are on the stage. If you can't have that as an actor, then you might as well at least have that other great thing, which is immortality."

There is something sad about this admission, as if he has never quite achieved what he wanted or been able to move on from the frozen celluloid image of himself at the height of fame. And perhaps, in the end, there is a small part of Rob Lowe that will forever be that teen icon, playing a saxophone in stonewashed jeans and a leather jacket, waiting for the glittering future to open up before him.