As I chatted last week to a jovial Ron Moody in the stalls at Oxford Playhouse, I had absolutely no idea how rattled he’d been on his last visit to the theatre in October 2001. My interview with the actor — known to all as the role-defining Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! — had been fixed only the day before. No time to read the book that supplies significant input on his working life. “Terrible title,” he says. “I can never remember it. Can you believe that?” Yes I can, because it is A Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography. A new paperback edition is coming out on April 15 (The Robson Press, £12.99).

A copy of the 2010 hardback arrived at my home a day or so later, courtesy of the Playhouse’s publicity department. It occurred to me that they might not have sent it had they realised what Moody had to say about the theatre in it; indeed, that the whole inspiration for his writing it had been an experience there as leading actor in the Oxford Stage Company’s 2001 revival of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians.

This was a production I reviewed enthusiastically for The Oxford Times. My notice focused on his touching portrayal of the old professional stand-up seen teaching the tricks of the trade to the new generation of comics. It also predicted, inter alia, a starry future for David Tennant, who played one of these young tyros.

What mattered to Ron, though, was his reception when he made “a grand yet discreet after-show entrance into the front-of-house bar and modestly await[ed] the plaudits”. What he heard, from two members of the theatre team, was: “Thank you for coming.”

“That was it?” writes Ron. The sum total of communal comment on my work, my skill, my dedication, not a word of me, for me (or by me for that matter), not one single individual, personal note of praise for a forcefully spoken, well-researched, Manchester-accented, old-time comedian-cum-teacher played with panache and 50 years of comedic experience by an actor of sufficient standing in the profession to deserve more than ‘Thank you’. ‘Thank you,’ for all that? ‘Thank you’, incidentally, which in theatrical rhetorical, means ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’.”

Readers will note that Moody is not one to underestimate his talents. Some will agree with me, perhaps, that his record justifies his self-regard.

Anyway, he sets out in the book from there to solve what he terms the ‘Oxford Enigma’, an answer to the question of why he needed more than thanks.

“What does the Moody fellow want? Personal praise? [Presumably, since he later concludes that, yes, “this is still the only valuable criterion of success”]. Theatrical hyperbole? Gushing ol’ luvvie chat?”

When other actors in the play are surprised at his anxiety, he asks: “Was there a hint in their company voice that it was time to face myself, an egomaniac has-been, so-called star, clutching at the fading limelight before it disappeared entirely. That may well be so.”

Self-awareness then, perhaps, as well as self-regard . . .

As if to demonstrate that all is sweetness and light these days in relation to Oxford Playhouse, Ron will be there to give a talk on February 15. It was this that prompted our brief get-together.

In the 15 minutes or so we have in the stalls, Ron tells me of happier visits to the Playhouse. These occurred during the 1950s when he was part of a team playing revues for Peter Myers and Ronnie Cass, theatrical impresarios who had spotted his talents in student shows at the London School of Economics.

“They said, ‘Would you like to be a professional?’ I said, ‘I don’t mind really.’”

The six years of touring that followed were, he says, the perfect introduction into show-business. “It was the best training I could have had, because you do everything: it was music hall, it was singing, it was comedy.”

That last came naturally. Ron says: “I was born with an instant desire to make people laugh. Looked at psychologically, it’s the need for acceptance, the right to live in society. We all look for it. This is why there have been so many wonderful comedians from immigrant groups in America.”

The grandson of Russian immigrants, Ron recognises himself as being in the same great tradition.