SIX DAYS BEFORE HIS MARRIAGE to Kim Basinger, Alec Baldwin is bodysurfing with me in the Atlantic below the East Hampton, New York mansion where the ceremony will be held. It's high tide, a rough, almost Homeric sea, dark and fall of strong currents.

"I wonder if Kim 'll still marry me if I'm in a wheelchair" Baldwin says, turning to catch an ugly two-metre high wave all the way in to the beach. When he comes back, he starts telling me about some friend of a friend down the shore who had his neck broken in waves like these two weeks ago. Then he rides off on the next one.

THE LOST FEW YEARS have been long for Alec Baldwin. It's clear the moment we meet at a discreet restaurant in Manhattan, New York. His eyes look like the Dead Sea - grey-blue and eerily still. He chooses his words painstakingly, keeping constant eye contact, as though inviting you to discuss the meaning of each sentence. His images and metaphors hint at enormous personal drama. Ten minutes into the conversation, he's talking about fathers. "I think every man needs them. Particularly in this business. I don't know how many times this last year I've been on the phone with..." - he goes off the record to list half a dozen movie stars, all huge names in their fifties - "trying to figure out how to get through it all."

Is it really that rough?

"Oh, yeah," he says, ordering the first of three cappuccinos. "Today's been a good day, but I'm thinking, all I want is to get out while I'm still standing and just see what the day brings. I feel like that scene in Raging Bull" His face contorts with pain and pride as he slips into a perfect De Niro voice: "You didn't knock me down. Sugar Ray. That's how I feel about some of the people in my industry."

What makes them so difficult to deal with?

"I think it's a confluence of three things. There's a lot more money to be made on Wall Street. If you want real power, go to Washington. If you want sex, go into the fashion business. But If you want the whole poison cocktail in one glass, then go to Hollywood."

FOR THE FIRST TEN YEMS of Baldwin's career. Fate was kind to him. Though he began university as a political-science student at George Washington University, in his final year he decided to swap to acting at New York University. It came easily to him, and from the start, people saw things in him. He was discovered, in classic style, by a casting assistant in 1980, while working double shifts as a lifeguard and as a waiter at a health club near New York's Lincoln Center. He got a role in a day-time soapie called The Doctors, at $560 an episode. He lasted till the show folded in 1982, then went out to LA for a part in a pilot, a West Hollywood apartment and a medical series opposite ex-Charlie's Angels star Shelley Hack. It went off the air in seven weeks, but the networks were after him. He moved to Venice Beach and landed a role in Knots Landing and the lead in a mini-series.

By 1986 he was sick of LA. And television. He was ready for serious acting - the stage and feature film. Both came readily and with honours. Three weeks after he moved back to New York, he had the lead in Joe Orton's Loot, followed by Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, Craig Lucas's Prelude To A Kiss and, in 1992, A Streetcar Named Desire (for which he received a Tony nomination).

Baldwin says that he picked his films less for the size of the role than for the quality of the script and the people involved: Tim Burton (Beetlejuice), Mike Nichols (Working Girl), Jonathan Demme (Married To The Mob), Woody Alien (Alice). He immersed himself in the five-to-15-minute roles, and his capacity for semblance was considerable; unless you were looking for Alec Baldwin in each of these movies, it would have been difficult to know it was him.

By 1989 Hollywood wanted him to be "the next Kevin Costner". When he returned to LA to star as Jack Ryan in The Hunt For Red October, there was a house waiting in the Hollywood Hills, equal bluing with Scan Cannery and a supporting cast of leading men. It was probably the least compelling acting he's done, but the movie grassed $170 million, two sequels were in the works and there was no turning back. Soon after he was back in Hollywood - Disney this time - for the Nell Simon comedy The Marrying Man. He fell in love with his co-star. Kim Basinger, started shooting - and then everything came apart.

Feuding between the stars and Disney began instantly and intensified as the shoot went a month over schedule and $8.5 million over budget. It was obvious that the film would flop and fingers had to be pointed. It degenerated into a PR nightmare, featuring endless articles quoting "studio sources" about alleged on- set tantrums: Alec's smashing of cellular phones and trailer walls; Basinger telling Nell Simon, "Whoever wrote this scene doesn't understand comedy"

Though he had a track record of being easy to work with, and the more rancorous stories imputed the problems to Basinger, a pariah-complex of sorts set in. Or as Alec now puts it: "I set myself back hght-years in the pantheon of Hollywoodism." Film sets began to feel like minefields, and roles that were promised vanished or ended up with Harrison Ford. He was meant to be in The Hunt For Red October sequels, but the first. Patriot Games, was delayed. He worked on the development of a script for The fugitive, only to watch it filmed without him. But his work got stronger. He was impressive in last year's Glengarry Glen Ross and was exempted from otherwise humdrum reviews of Prelude To A Kiss. Other than The Getaway, however, the roles he really wanted eluded him.

It got uglier in January this year, when Basinger lost a landmark $10 million lawsuit stemming from a dispute over Boxing Helena.

The trial, Alec says, "was the worst possible agony for a man like me. To have something happen to the woman I love, and there's not a thing I can do about it."

"It's hard to describe exactly," he says. "Things happen in life that are tough, then they get tougher. You feel like you're carrying a book of asshole coupons, and you can react to only five per calendar year. If you make it six, you are the asshole, and then you are given an asshole certificate. Every morning it's the same: put on the suit, put on the game face, go get raped by jurisprudence. Finally I woke up one morning and realised I had become Richard Nixon. Uh-oh. Time to reconsider."

WE'RE AT AN UNBEARABLY fashionable Artists and Writers softball game in East Hampton, New York. The Artists are so far behind they're bound to lose, but Alec is still trying to win. He's well short coast base when Jay Mdnerney for the Writers catches the ball. Alec 's out, and everyone knows it, but he keeps running straight into McInerney, and knocks him over. Alec laughs hysterically.

After the game, we pack into Alec's black four-wheel drive and make our way to a charity benefit. Among the local super-rich, Alec looks like a gate-crasher in his shorts and Nike T-shirt. News of his collision with McInemey has made the rounds, and he seems to enjoy being the butt of jokes - until a very pale, blond woman in a low-cut crimson dress, whom Alec had been showering with attention minutes before, shouts, "There's the loser!" as we pass her able. She has a big, imponderable smile on her face.

"The what?" asks Alec, in an incredulous tone.

"The loser," she repeats, lower this time, but still keeping the smile on determinedly.

"But we're still gonna go to my car in the parking lot, right?" he says. "Remember you were going to make it happen for me."

The woman's face and neck turn the colour other dress, and the people at her table get silent. The Joke isn't fanny for her, but Alec isn't joking. "Win or lose," he says, making the "s" hiss, "you were going to make that a reality for me."

"I do not appreciate being the loser," he says as we head for a table on the lawn, where his best friends, Ron, Peter and Jeffrey are.

Very rich men, they wear old jeans, T-shirts, sneakers; the talk ranges foul old movies to former high school friends and drinking mates. It's a real Long Island crowd, that other Long Island, 50 miles down the shore; when celebrity friends drift by the table or in and out of conversation, they tend to be of that ilk - Billy Joel, Gerry Cooney - not next-door neighbours like Lauren Bacon or Kathleen Turner. In their company, Alec looks himself for the first time in this long day of hobnobbing.

WE’RE STANDING ON the corner outside his apartment building on the Upper West Side, a brutally hot day waiting endlessly for yet another political fundraiser for the Democrats. On a public telephone with a campaign worker 10 minutes later, listening to excuses and making another plan, he seems entirely impassive - till he hears the click on the end of the line. Then something clicks in him: his jaw tightens and his face colours with rage as he hangs up with a slam that makes the metal booth sing on its concrete base. He storms 10 paces ahead of me down the heat-emptied street, cursing in the foulest, most unprintable language. Twenty minutes later, in a taxi to the airport, he's still going strong, holding the leather strap by the window with white knuckles. His rage begins to lessen as we speed along, the skyline of New York opening before us, but I can see how relentessly it gnaws at him.

Then suddenly it's all gone. He's reeling off passages from On The Waterfront in a Brando voice so good that the taxi driver's eyes are glued to the rearview mirror. We reach the terminal just before takeoff and the woman selling tickets yells, "All right, now which one are you?" - hardly a question calculated to please Alec (his brothers, Daniel, William and Stephen, of course, are also actors). But his anger has passed, and he spends a minute convincing her he's Billy and I'm Alec.

WEEKS LATER I HEAR that rage again as I drive up to his house. His friends. Peter and Jeffrey, stand by the tall hedges of his house, admiring their black, hyperpolished Porsche and Harley-Davidson, seemingly oblivious to the torrent of language coming from inside, though I hear the first four-letter words halfway down the lane. A reporter, Peter tells me, has trashed Rim in an interview.

In the four-wheel drive half-an-hour later, riding in a convoy of shiny black vehicles past plane trees and mansions (on our way to watch a friend play polo in East Hampton) Alec asks me if I'd like to come with him and write an account of his going down to Atlanta and kicking the shit out of the reporter.

That would do wonders for your career.

"Fuck the career," he snaps. "And fuck the profile. This really isn't my life, you know, these benefits and polo matches. I really wanted to go to, like, a crack house with you or something. Let's do something dumb. Let's commit a crime. Why don't we kill someone? All right, I got it," he says. "Let's get in a hot air balloon and go to Pittsburgh."

I ask if he was really so naive as to think he could take on a studio like Disney or turn his nose up at a $14 million deal from Paramount and get away unscathed. And don't all public figures have to put up with media bullshit?

"Yes and no," he says. "To the extent I didn't know what was going on, what the limits were - yes. But also no, because it's a very wilful naivete. I get that from my father. My brother Billy said something I'll never forget. I was going on about some issue I was totally right about - but then again I was totally wrong, because I wouldn't drop it. He said, 'Don't be like Dad.' I'll never forget that. 'Don't be like Dad.'"

"He was a politics and government teacher and very involved in the Democratic party. My father was a man who put his whole soul into his work. He would have gone much further, but there was a big reactionary local politician on the Board of Education, who wanted him to kiss his ass."

"You can't really fathom how little a cliche it is when I say 'put his whole soul into his work'. And likewise, I can't explain to you the investment I make in each role. My father would teach till 3pm, coach till 5pm, change shirts in the dean's office, get a slice of pizza and then chaperone a social till 10.30pm. This was almost every night."

"At home, my mother was asleep by 9pm with a Jacqueline Susann novel, and I'd time it, so when her eyes were glazing over, I'd say 'Mom, don't you think I should wait up for Dad, so we don't have to lock up?' Then, he hums a TV jingle, "my real life began - Cunga Din, How Green Was My Valley. I'd wait for the scene in How Green Was My Valley when the brothers go kick the shit out of the school- teacher. I was like that with my brothers. Danny'd come in, trying to hide tears, my sister right behind, saying, 'Danny got beat up,' and I was on my bike like Sonny on the freeway in The Godfather. I wouldn't even dismount, I'd just fly over the handlebars and pound this guy before they could peel me off and explain that Danny had thrown a rock at the guy's car."

ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES on the floor of a Cessna 206, looking down nearly 3,000 metres through goggles on the endless grey-green stretch of the San Joaquin Valley, Alec Baldwin is thinking about his wife.

The balloon to Pittsburgh has become a high-altitude tandem skydive in California. Fortunately for me, an extreme acrophobe, my weight is over the legal limit, so only he and the instructor will be jumping.

At 3,500 metres, Alec and the instructor inch toward the door to get into position, and everything seems manageable until the door opens, and a deafening breufeeewlwwwssshh of air comes in, flattening Baldwin's goggles against his eyes. Stepping onto the wing strut, he can feel, hear, touch the air. He realised, he told me later: "This is not in my head, this is a huge wall of reality. This will prove if God really loves me. Does God love me?"

Alec is screaming as he steps into the abyss and the pair start cannon balling head over heels and out of control, before he throws his arms and legs back to make a sail of himself Within seconds, the headlong plummet slows to pure flight. Belly to the earth, Alec is still deaf to the sound of his own screams, which are now of exhilaration. He starts laughing hysterically; never looking down as they soar left and right, even doing a fall 360 degrees after the chute opens, and they glide slowly down to land on the earth, and Alec kisses it on his hands and knees.