MANDY Smith, former wife of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, would like to become a barrister. They are, she says, the ones up there doing it. She wants also to ‘do more journalism’ and interview Princess Diana. ‘She’s Cancer and Charles is Scorpion (sic),’ explains television presenter Mandy, ‘and I’m Cancer and Bill’s Scorpion.’ She is keen to dispel the bimbo image, has dyed her blonde hair to thinking woman’s chestnut and talked her life story into a book, It’s All Over Now.

Mandy’s mother Patsy, half a century old and in leggings, answered the door with an accommodating manner and the face of a victim. The house is obsessively spotless, with frou-frou curtains, Fantasia video, two Yorkshire terriers and 90ft garden. A silent pectoral type stands in the kitchen: Pat Van Den Hauwe, Mandy’s husband and Millwall footballer. Mandy is running late, upstairs.

She was 13 and lived on a council estate when Bill, 47, seduced her. ‘It was like I was much older, not a 13-year-old in little socks and school skirt,’ she says. It was a shocking pre-pubescent affair which led to her marriage at 19 and divorce at 21. After the marriage, she wasted to 5 1/2 stone and was close to death.

Now 23, she looks exceedingly pretty even in a track-suit and with seriously medallioned sunglasses for a hairband. She has a tan, healthy figure, big chestnut eyes framed with charcoal make-up and Cartlandesque lashes, veneers on her teeth and French-polished nails so long they could hold up a picture. But she has smelly breath. She ate millet and soya milk for breakfast.

She has pulled herself back from the brink, partly with religion. She was raised a Catholic and her book is dedicated to, among others, ‘the dear Lord God above’. ‘Yeah, He’s important to me,’ says Mandy, who speaks with a lazy norf London accent and drops her aitches.

‘I don’t think He gets enough recognition for what he does. Look at all the lovely animals you can have.’ She prays ‘up to 10 times a day,’ normally for 10 minutes. ‘I don’t even realise I’m doing it. Sometimes I’m watching telly and, if it isn’t interesting, I’ll go into a trance for 10 minutes and chat to God.’

What is her concept of the Almighty? ‘He’s a busy person, but always finds a bit of time to talk to you when you need it. If He can’t, He’s got all these angels and saints. Saint Antony is always helping me out. I have a quick chat with him an hour before I go out. I say, ‘St Antony, you around? I’m going into town, need to park and you know what it’s like’.’ She always finds a space. It may, she says, be coincidence.

We’re sitting in Mandy’s white conservatory. She shares her Muswell Hill home with Pat and her sister Nicola. Patsy has moved out but works here, as Mandy’s agent. A year ago, Patsy broke up with Stephen Wyman, 33, reportedly at Mandy’s wedding. Mandy becomes cagey. Then lets slip that they’re back together.

‘When Bill found out, he wouldn’t talk to Stephen,’ she says. ‘He sacked him from work about six months ago and said, ‘If you go out with Patsy, I don’t want to see you.’ He was going to take Stephen out of his will.’ Now Bill and Stephen are reconciled and Stephen (‘he’s very clever’) works for his father, typing his next volume of autobiography.

How did Mandy feel when her mother started a romance with Stephen eight years ago? ‘It was like, ‘Oh God mum, how could you? He’s so young, he’s Bill’s son and what will people think?’ But before she went out with a man who drank a lot and lived with his mother.’

Isn’t there something unnerving about such a rivalrous, competitive mother stepping on her patch? ‘Oh no, no. We’re not like that at all.’ How does Mandy feel about Bill being so horrid about possibly becoming her step-grandfather? ‘I’d ask him for pocket money,’ she jokes, ‘a blank cheque.’

BILL gave Mandy a settlement of £580,000. ‘Take off the house and lawyers’ bills, and I was left with £50,000 which went on a tax bill. If I wanted money I’d have stayed with him.’

But why did her mother ‘sell’ her 13-year-old daughter? ‘She was really ill at the time and thought she was going to die – we didn’t know what of…’ (Mandy’s temper rises) ‘and he looked after me.’ Wasn’t it because he was a rich celebrity? ‘No, no. We weren’t impressed by people.’ Why didn’t Mandy help the police press child abuse charges? ‘I felt partly to blame, like it was my fault as well,’ she says, with the classic guilt of an abuse victim. ‘I fell in love with Bill. I wasn’t a little sex temptress. But I’d feel too guilty getting someone charged for sex abuse.’ Unsurprisingly, Mandy’s marriage to Pat hasn’t run smoothly. ‘I didn’t talk to Pat when we met because he was so shy. Now there can be a bit of a clash, two sensitive souls together. He becomes paranoid and aggressive,’ says Mandy.

In addition, Pat’s ex resents Mandy seeing their daughter. ‘Er, um, well Pat left her for me. I’m sorry, I’m not going to take the blame. It was his choice. I don’t know the woman. But she’s said a few stupid things on the phone to Pat about me. Like ‘I don’t want my child going over to that house’.’

Did Mandy believe her marriage vows to be for life? ‘I thought ‘I just hope it lasts’, but you have to be realistic. Who knows if it’ll last forever, for a year or two?’ Bill was unfaithful; how does she know that Pat is faithful? ‘Well, Bill wrote it down in his diary and Pat doesn’t keep a diary.’ Sex with Pat, she insists, is now all right. ‘I feel a bit more normal.’

Mandy has been helped by therapy. ‘Years ago a fan wrote recommending this woman. I thought ‘don’t bother’. Then one day when I was really desperate, I phoned her.’ Mandy went twice weekly for six months. ‘I felt better that it wasn’t a journalist I was speaking to. We talked about sex, feelings and my Dad leaving when I was three. He was a gambler and used to spend all the money.’

Mandy has also improved physically. She reckons she suffered from premenstrual syndrome (a hormonal imbalance) and allergies. ‘I was ill from 11 years old, but really bad in 1988 when I was in the Cromwell Hospital for six months,’ she says. ‘My self-esteem went down. Now I can get up and go out on my own every day. I used to need someone with me constantly. I always felt ill and faint. I thought I was going to die.’

She eats three tofu-style meals a day, plus starchy snacks, and spends ‘at least two hours’ in the gym daily. ‘If I can’t go to the gym during the day, I try to go at night.’ Her food faddishness and compulsive exercising sound like anorexia. ‘In my doctor’s and my eyes, it’s PMS. I know many doctors thought I was just anorexic and a crank trying to hide it.’ She’s spent £20,000 on doctors in the last two years ‘on a Chinese herbalist, acupuncturist, doctor, counselling’. The court awarded her £100,000 for medical fees.

ANGELA Rippon hides her feelings cleverly. She controls her face and emotions as if she’s on screen. She’s professionally nice, like a Tory lady at a fund-raising garden fete, talks becomingly, looks squeaky clean, drinks mint tea and smiles vocationally.

But she becomes visibly flustered about sex in her broken 22-year marriage. And laughs with thespian disregard when denying her alleged love affair with the former husband of the Princess Royal, Captain Mark Phillips. We meet in the fashionable Halcyon hotel because Angela refuses to allow journalists into the privacy of her home. She’s well known for refusing to answer questions, saying it’s personal. She introduces herself with a deliberately strong handshake, direct eye contact and green room friendliness. She’s shorter and smaller off camera, neat in pink and white check linen jacket and what she’d probably call slacks.

She looks youthful, 49 years old, with the famous arched eyebrows, square face, lovely eyes, clear complexion and sensibly fluffed up hair; an image befitting the Angel of her name. But there’s something unauthentic about her voice. Perhaps a repressed anger beneath the extreme niceness? Angela was a big celebrity in the days before Hello! made everybody one. She became the first woman BBC newsreader in 1976, revealed her legs when she danced out from behind the newsreader’s desk on Morecambe and Wise, presented television coverage of Crufts, shimmered across the ballroom floor compering Come Dancing, appeared on intellectually deep-frozen quiz shows like What’s My Line and grilled politicians on LBC.

In 1990 it was reported that she was Britain’s best-paid female media star. That she’d signed a £100,000-a-year contract with LBC. ‘I wasn’t earning anything like that,’ she says now. ‘People have always thought of a figure, doubled it and added a couple of noughts where my salary is concerned.’

Last week Angela quit her job at LBC, 24 hours after learning that she wouldn’t be required by London Radio when it takes over from franchise-loser LBC in October. (She’d already lost her morning news programme under the former LBC management.) She attributes this to her strong association with the old station and her high profile with LBC. ‘I’ve won four awards in the last four years,’ says Angela, speaking restrainedly.

Angela says that the parting was not acrimonious. Yet a London Radio spokesman was last week quoted as saying: ‘What need is there on radio for former TV personalities?’ Does she take these knocks personally? ‘You can’t,’ she replies. ‘You can’t buckle under every time someone says: ‘Thank you, we don’t want to employ you’. You’d end up destroyed and a hollow shell. You’d jump in a hole and never be seen again.’

Angela the celebrity has been toughing it out for the last 20 years. Her job loss is her third such major blow. As soon as TV-am got its licence, the BBC eased Angela out of her newsreading job. ‘I was called in on a Wednesday and told ‘don’t come in on Monday’. At the time you feel quite hurt, but you can’t make people employ you.’ Then two months after she started at TV-am, as one of the Famous Five who helped launch it, she was sacked ignominiously. ‘That was horrendous. I’d never want to live through that again.’

Her most recent demise marks the end of an era. ‘When I started in television 27 years ago, there was very little I could do without getting into the Press,’ she admits. ‘Now I’m not in that spotlight or rarefied goldfish bowl quite as often or long. Celebrity has become diluted. It takes the heat off you.’ Now she’ll continue her television series about The Entertainers – interviews with Mike Yarwood and suchlike – and finish a Remembrance Day special for Radio 2.

Angela was the only child of an engineer and china shop manageress. ‘I was a tom-boy, not at all rebellious as a teenager and being an only child made me self-sufficient, but my friends are very important.’ She was raised in a small council house (“a normal working-class family’) in the suburbs of Plymouth. She went to grammar school, gained nine O-levels and left, aged 17, a term before she was due to take A-levels. ‘There was an opportunity to work on a newspaper. The job was there, so I took it.’

She met Christopher Dare, her first serious boyfriend and a car parts dealer, when she was 17 at a YMCA dance. In 1990 their marriage ended but they’ve not yet divorced. ‘There are all sorts of complications.’ She won’t reveal them. Why did they break up? ‘Oh we just grew apart.’ What changed after 22 years? ‘Oh, lots of things.’

Christopher has a new partner, Angela doesn’t. Angela says they’re still good friends and talk weekly. ‘I still dine alone with my husband.’ She’s never met his new partner, she says, with an edge to her voice. Angela, who wears her engagement ring, is losing her composure.

Why did they never have children? ‘We just never had them.’ Because they didn’t want them? ‘Because it never happened.’ They tried and wanted them? She chokes on her tea. ‘We had a perfectly normal married life, but it just never happened.’ Did they have tests and so on? ‘No, we just compensated in other ways, by being busy and getting on with our lives.’ Did she feel unfulfilled or distressed? ‘No.’

What then of the rumour of an affair with Captain Mark Phillips? ‘It was a load of cobblers. I was simply writing his biography. He laughed it off and Princess Anne just said, ‘Oh, don’t take any notice,’ when the gossip started.’ Would she have liked to have had an affair with him? ‘It simply never crossed my mind.’

Now Angela can interview herself. ‘What is the most important question you could ask yourself?’ I ask, lamely. Angela ums and ahs. ‘Um,’ she says. ‘What makes me tick? The thing that makes me tick is that I enjoy what I do.’ I’m bored. Maybe she’s too private, too bland or too nice. ‘How would you get yourself talking about something you’ve never spoken about publicly before?’ I enquire. ‘What’s the most interesting personal question you would ask yourself?’

ON THE phone Sir Antony Buck says he wants to be paid for talking to me. No chance! So he taunts that he may sell his story elsewhere.

He sounds like a conceited thespian, with the comic tones of a Hermoine Gingold, says a mid-morning interview would be gruellingly early and eventually demands nothing more than copies of The Sun and Daily Telegraph so he doesn’t have to go out.

Sir Antony, 65, the distinguished former Tory MP and navy minister, talks about his sex life, his 34-year marriage to Judy and his infidelities; of meeting the notorious Bienvenida Perez-Blanco when he was 61 and she 33 (‘Any chance of a Buck?’ was one memorable headline) and marrying three weeks later; and of his most recent marriage to Tamara Norashkaryan, the Russian tourist who turned up on his doorstep bearing a press cutting about him.

We meet at Sir Antony’s rented Kennington flat. Tamara ‘dislikes publicity’ and has gone out. But today Bienvenida has revealed in The Sun that she was a £1,000-a-night prostitute. ‘I don’t think Bienvenida was a hooker. Darling, I know her better than you,’ says Sir Antony, later. ‘She’s just behaving irrationally.’

Sir Antony wears longish hair, a grubby navy cardigan and has an unlit cigar in his mouth. His hands shake and he’s absent minded, asking four times how I take coffee. He breathes raspily and has a smoker’s cough. ‘I don’t cough,’ he says, after one outbreak. His tiny drawing room has grimy whitewashed walls, fake flowers and a collection of silver Lucifer boxes, red ministerial box and a picture of his hero, Winston Churchill. Since Sir Antony shot to notoriety – when Bienvenida, who had an affair with Chief of Defence Staff Sir Peter Harding while she was married to Sir Antony and then colluded in Sir Peter’s entrapment by a newspaper – we’ve been treated to a glut of increasingly preposterous and sordid stories. Sir Antony, for example, introduced Bienvenida to Judge Harkess; and then she introduced the family to public relations man Max Clifford to help them purge themselves publicly of their torrid ‘Alan Clark’s sex coven’ scandal. But last week Sir Antony won the award for vainglorious behaviour when he went on television to talk about his new-found happiness and to take ‘custody’ of his beloved King Charles spaniels while wives numbers two and three kissed and Tamara stormed off saying she’d leave for ever because she heard Sir Antony call Bienvenida ‘darling’.

Why on earth has Sir Antony encouraged the chronicling of these absurd goings on? ‘You can’t stop the publicity when photographers and reporters are stacked up outside the house.’ But did he have to take charge of his dogs on camera? ‘Well I’ve got to go out.’ He maintains that years in politics taught him that it’s best to co-operate with the Press. Isn’t his publicity-seeking simply excessive vanity? ‘What’s it got to do with vanity?’ he stumbles. ‘I don’t want this.’

HE claims he hasn’t made money from the stories. ‘Darling, I’ve made nothing.’ But last week he spoke to Max Clifford. What did the king of kiss ‘n’ tell suggest? ‘That’s a matter for me and him.’ Suffice to say that it was Sir Antony who approached Max.

Sir Antony fits the Max mould. He talks enthusiastically about his sex life. ‘I’m not a sex maniac,’ he says. ‘I’m a perfectly normal heterosexual with healthy urges. I’ll have sex until I stop feeling like it. Some men continue into their 80s.’ Is he a good lover? ‘I’m average. Never had any complaints.’ Well, what of Bienvenida’s allegation that he took two years to consummate their marriage? ‘Absolute nonsense. We consummated it at once.’ The younger son of an agricultural merchant (father) and founder member (mother) of The Royal College of Nursing, he joined the army and served in Berlin during the blockade. Next he went to Cambridge, where he read history and law and was chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association and college captain of swimming. ‘I got a first-class degree in my first year, second in my second and third in my third. It wasn’t the rake’s progress.’

In 1961 he became MP for Colchester, holding the seat for 30 years. He’s particularly proud of his time as navy minister. (He has discussed the Bienvenida revelations with his political friend Sir Geoffrey Howe. ‘I don’t ask his advice.’) His first marriage ended in divorce after three decades. ‘Judy fell in love with somebody else. The strains of political life didn’t help,’ he says, leaning forward on his tatty sofa. Was he faithful? ‘For a very long time, yes.’ Did his infidelity contribute to their break up? ‘She wasn’t keen to come to London, so one got lonely.’ Now they rarely communicate. (They have a daughter, Louisa, sometime radio presenter. The recent revelations have also put a strain on his relationship with her.) Sir Antony’s downfall has also been financial. ‘I have very little money.’ He lived with Judy in a Georgian house with a swimming pool, but sold it when the marriage dissolved. Later Bienvenida took a ‘substantial’ sum; he refuses to disclose the figure. ‘I might claw it back, but you can’t get blood out of a stone. I have very little money.’

WE come thus to Bienvenida. He deems her revelations ‘sad and sordid’, but doesn’t regret the relationship. ‘I don’t know why we married so quickly. Mutual attraction, I suppose.’ Was she attracted to his title, charm or good looks? ‘I’m not particularly any of those things. We just got on and had a rapport.’ He denies her claim that he abused her physically. ‘The only time was when she attacked me. It was in self-defence after she’d had too much to drink.’

Sir Antony doesn’t feel that Tamara, last seen in a fury on television, heralds more trouble. ‘There’s a stability in her and intellect.’ Doesn’t he find it suspect that she hunted him down after reading about him? ‘No, she saw a picture of me with the dogs and thought she’d like to meet the dogs.’ Sir Antony’s nemesis is shocking. He tries very hard to present an optimistic front. He looks uncomfortable when I ask whether he suffers from depression – ‘we all have periods of depression. But I’m not a depressive, I don’t get bitterly depressed’ – claiming he’s phlegmatic. He denies that his drinking habits are excessive. ‘Nonsense. I don’t drink three bottles a day. Just a bottle of wine a day. I’m not an alcoholic.’

RICHARD Briers has plenty to be sad about. The star of The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles watched his mother die slowly over 12 years, diabetic, blind and with her leg amputated. And he stood by helplessly for a decade as his father perished painfully from lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, Richard, 60, who was brought up in genteel poverty and fears financial insecurity, dreads old age and dying.

He’s driven ‘through a monsoon’ to meet me and now we repair to his Bath Spa hotel bedroom. He jokes with the staff, signing his ‘autograph’ in the guest register, being infectiously funny, habitually saying ‘becosh’ and ‘sho’ in that Tony Bennish voice of his, twiddling his eyebrows when he’s rattled, rolling his own with Virginia tobacco and exuding bonhomie and charm. He looks like a country golfer in his tartan tie and casual trousers, but he has impossibly sad eyes.

He’s touring with Paul Eddington in Home, David Storey’s play about disillusionment, first produced at The Royal Court with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. ‘We play two old boys who can’t cope and live in a mental hospital,’ says Richard. ‘We’ve had terrible marital breakdowns and live in a fantasy world to protect ourselves from reality.’

There was an early production difficulty when Richard refused to work opposite actress Liz Smith because he thought her too old. So she was sacked six weeks after she was contracted (No More Mr Nice Guy, screamed a tabloid).

‘We had casting approval but the director went to Tokyo and forgot that,’ Richard replies, commenting for the first time. ‘She’s a super actress but wrong for the part. I wrote to her and said how very sorry I was that she wasn’t right and had been badly treated by me and I regretted the hurt caused.’ She didn’t write back.

Sadly, the health of Paul, his great friend and co-star, might now be a problem. He suffers from diabetes and a rare skin cancer. ‘It spreads, poor thing. I remember when we were doing a play 40 years ago he had this red thing on his stomach. Now it’s on his face. He has ultra-violet therapy, like going on a sun bed, so he looks as if he’s been in Malta on holiday for 10 years.’ Might Paul collapse as he did on stage last year? ‘He fell over once in a Pinter play because of his diabetes. He hadn’t eaten properly. He got up again immediately, so naturally everyone thought he was going to die.’ He speaks sardonically.

Richard knows much about diabetes. His only sibling, Jane, suffers. As did his late mother, Morna, who died in 1992. ‘It was terrible when my mother had her leg amputated and went blind. Bloody awful watching her deterioration, particularly dreadful the last two years. It was obscene the way her luck ran out.’ He’s a firm believer in luck and refers often to his own fortune.

Jane, an unlucky actress, moved home when she divorced to live with and tend her mother for 12 years. Richard visited weekly. ‘Poor old thing mother, couldn’t die, clung on and had a cruel, rotten life. She had that extraordinary bravery which only females have. I was lucky and didn’t sink because I was busy working and have a strong private life. I wasn’t broken up when she died because she was released from her suffering.’ Does he support euthanasia? He looks nonplussed. Would he have liked to have given her a pill to end her misery? ‘I couldn’t have, no. I’m too much of a coward.’ Dismissing any legal implications, could he have coped with it emotionally? ‘I suppose so, yes.’ Before his mother’s demise, he watched his father die 12 years ago. ‘He had a horrendous time towards the end.’ Richard says the family had been close. ‘I grew up in Raynes Park during the Blitz. Your family unites very tightly when you’re being bombed.’ Were they genuinely fond of one another or was it a closeness born of circumtances? ‘I think it was real. But we had our spats because we’re all highly strung.’ His father – ‘He had about 75 jobs, one as progress chaser for GEC’ – was feckless. Consequently, money was always tight. ‘When I was a child, things were run on the basis that if the rich uncle sent a fiver at Christmas, my father could go to the off-licence. He was a good-time guy.’ Richard’s education was erratic and he left school at 16 without taking any exams. An indication of emotional disturbance? ‘I just wasn’t interested, didn’t listen and loathed school.’

He became hungry and ambitious. A workaholic who would rehearse a series by day, act a play at night and record a TV episode on Sundays for months on end. Now he says such driven feelings have dissipated and he denies a tabloid report that he suffered breakdowns. ‘If you don’t get frightened on first nights, you’re nuts.’ (‘I didn’t know you’d had nervous breakdowns, dear,’ said his mother, sweetly, after the article appeared.) He began acting four decades ago, playing Hamlet, ‘like a demented typewriter’, in the words of WA Darlington, The Daily Telegraph’s redoubtable critic. ‘I took 25 minutes off the running time. I was the only Hamlet in the world who gave the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards.’ Four years ago he returned to serious parts with Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, when Branagh cast him as King Lear. He’s only ever had two years out of work, never made it in films – ‘I’m hardly the film-star type. I did dreadful films and was dreadful in them’ – and doesn’t anticipate work drying up. ‘I can play great roles and grandfathers now. If I start losing my memory, I’ll do radio. If we really get past it, my wife (actress Ann Davies) and I are going to pool all our enormous resources and influence to get two small parts in The Archers.’ His next part is in Down to Earth, a sitcom by Esmonde and Larbey who wrote The Good Life. He plays a 60-year-old who falls from grace, losing a job in a banana republic and returning penniless to England. Richard fears nemesis. When we talk he says, often, what goes up must come down. ‘The worst thing for me is not not making money, but having it and losing it. The nightmare scenario would be Lloyd’s.’

WHEN Barbara Kaczmarowska Hamilton drew the Duchess of York, she discovered her sitter was an artist. First the Duchess photographed the initial sketch by Basha, as she’s known to her friends. Then the Duchess revealed that she daubs cityscapes, has a painting teacher, and hangs her work on the walls at Romenda Lodge. Basha had a quick private view of the Duchess’s watercolours and thought them exceedingly good.

Later they spoke to the director of the Accademia Italiana, and the Duchess was told that the Accademia wants to exhibit her work when she’s completed a few more paintings. ‘The Duchess doesn’t talk about her paintings because she doesn’t think they’re very good,’ says Basha enthusiastically, in her Polish accent.

Basha is the society portrait pasteller de nos jours and divides her working time between Palm Beach, Jamaica and London. Her sitters include Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Norman Parkinson, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mohammed Al Fayed, the Sultan of Brunei, Denis and Carol Thatcher, the Marquess of Bath, Professor Norman Stone and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Her finished subjects have enormous eyes with faraway looks in them, flattering cheekbones, swirly hair and romantic airs. Even Sir Clive Sinclair looks attractive.

RECENTLY Basha had an Accademia Italiana exhibition in which a study of the Duchess and a conversation piece with her daughters made the headlines. The newspapers claimed the Duchess intended to give the latter to her estranged husband to commemorate their first meeting at Royal Ascot nine years ago. ‘It’s not for Andrew,’ says Basha. ‘Why should she give it to him when she likes it?’ The paintings were a gift – normally she charges £3,500 a portrait – from Basha to the Duchess.

She often dashes her portraits off in two and half hours – ‘If I’m in a good mood, I’m all excited like a tiger …’ And she has a facility for likeness, according to fellow artist, the Marquess of Bath. ‘In Polish we have an expression for that. We say I have ‘monkey ability’.’ She’s a delightful, exuberant ingenue, and speaks in parentheses, her conversation darting everywhere excitedly. Life imitates art because she looks a decade younger than her 45 years, and she wears a classic pistachio suit, glasses and an antique gold link bracelet.

She had a subject who loved her portrait so much that she went to the bank, got out all her jewellery and told Basha to choose whatever she wanted. Basha selected the link bracelet.

We’re talking in her South Kensington studio where she comes three days a week and prefers her sitters to sit. There are gilt-framed portraits everywhere, pop music playing and a photograph signed ‘with all good wishes’ from Lady Thatcher on the mantelpiece. A jocular portrait of Norman Parkinson hangs in the bathroom. ‘I met him at a ball and in his jacket he had a silver book of photographs. I thought, ‘How funny, he’s a famous photographer and he’s still showing his work around and needing compliments.”

Basha has captured Prince Michael as well. ‘I had an exhibition two years ago in the Polish Club and he saw a magazine picture of one of the portraits, of someone he knew,’ she says. ‘So he went off to the Polish Club by himself. Nobody recognised him, nobody said ‘hello’, nobody took his coat, that’s terribly funny, no? Then his secretary called me and said he needed a Masonic portrait. So they commissioned me to do him in Masonic clothes and he liked it so much that he sent it out printed on his Christmas cards.’ What was the Prince like to draw? ‘He has an exceptionally good face to paint, he’s like a Czar and very jolly and good humoured.’ Basha became a society portrait painter unintentionally. She was born in Sopot, went to the Academy of Art in Gdansk and left Poland when she was 24 to study in Venice.

‘It’s not a fantastic story about defecting and being tortured. I just left on holiday and didn’t return.’ In Italy she held an exhibition of her abstract paintings and one portrait. ‘Everybody came to the portrait and said, ‘Gosh, if you can paint like that, why do you do those?” NOWADAYS she doesn’t lead a socially strenuous life and is surprised to find herself in the newspapers. She married late, aged 37, to Ian Hamilton, whose great uncle was the general Sir Ian Hamilton of Gallipoli fame. She had her first child when she was 38 and they live in a 1950s house overlooking Watership Down where Ian, she says, is rich and Scottish, wears a cap, wellies, plants trees and doesn’t work. They spend much of the year in Jamaica where Ian’s family used to have sugar plantations. And they go to Palm Beach. ‘I hadn’t even heard of it before.’ She laughs and creases her nose. ‘In Poland, Palm Beach isn’t very popular.’

I look around the studio again. There hangs Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘One of the most classical heads one can see nowadays and a picturesque character.’ And a picture of Rula Lenska: ‘Usually she hangs in the Polish Club. It’s nice that people can sit and have lunch under pictures of themselves.’

Nearby is a dashing one of the Marquess of Bath: ‘One of London’s most extraordinary characters.’ And one of the Duke of Kent: ‘I don’t think I got him quite right. He’s not someone you can easily get to know. He’s composed, closed and charming.’

It’s sad the walls don’t have ears. Basha says she’s like a shrink to her sitters. ‘I’m always surprised. It’s like an hour of truth,’ she explains. ‘They have big trust, tell me everything and then I forget. Often extremely personal things. A pose is like a marriage for life, it’s very psychological and special.’ Did the Duchess talk to her about her personal problems? ‘I can’t say anything.’ But Basha, who imagined the Duchess as a ‘crazy bully and careless character’ before she met her, found her a sensitive, wonderful and powerful personality.

WHEN Deborah Moggach’s partner of 10 years died in February, they stopped the film at the Empire Cinema. The paramedics leapt on him like athletes, attempted resuscitation, the theatre emptied in a flash, and the police cleared Leicester Square. He was the cartoonist Mel Calman and he had a fatal heart attack as somebody’s throat was being cut on screen. His death was no more extraordinary than the life of Deborah, 45, the popular novelist.

In 1981, Deborah agreed to have a baby for her infertile sister Alex, offering to borrow her man, Brian, for a few nights. Deborah said she didn’t fancy Brian and was doing it out of noblesse: this was reproduction not adultery. She thought artificial insemination too cold and official. But would Tony (now Deborah’s ex husband) be upset? Or Alex jealous? Or one of the lovers fall for the other? Deborah never found out because Alex and Brian separated; but she put her experiences into a novel, To Have And To Hold.

Or go back another decade. Then Debraless, as she was known, was at Bristol University: a middle-class gel living with a bus conductor, trying LSD and pot and visiting a shrink to talk about her rebellious penchant for rough trade. She’s always had a predilection for butchers’ boys, men covered in plaster and is, she says, the sort of woman who hyperventilates when she sees a skip.

We meet in her Camden Town home (colourful, surreal and messy) with Jocasta Innes splodge painted walls, a dinosaur skull in the sitting room (it turns out to be a hippo’s; she bought it for £4 when she was six) Penguin books and Ella Fitzgerald to Brahms tapes. Two characters converse in a Calman cartoon: “Do you realise we’re stuck in a frame we can’t sell.” Deborah offers wine and freshly ground coffee – her voice rich but tremulous – then poses revealingly for the photos in her shredded Indian chiffon skirt. She has forcible features, tumbling hair, ink writing on her wrists and smokes roll-ups. She laughs to hide her pain and is witty, observant and shrewd. Lovely.

And she understands the game. Next week The Ex-Wives – about a boozy, sweaty, superannuated actor and his exes – appears in paperback and features Penny, a journalist: ‘From strangers she had extracted humiliating personal confessions…’ it reads.

Deborah writes lying on her bed, Pentel spilling on the counterpane, doodling naked women when it’s going badly. She’s adapting Moll Flanders for TV and writing a kidnap novel. But she’s found it hard to work since Mel died.

She fell in love with Mel when she walked into his larder and discovered he’d pencilled a face around every wall tack. They never married or lived together; she says she didn’t want to inflict her adolescent children on him, and loved the schizophrenic life of visiting him in Soho. ‘I’d come back in the morning wearing my high red heels and everybody would think I was a hooker. Then I’d change into my horrible baggy working trousers.’ Mel died when he was writing a radio play about a man who has a heart attack. Deborah’s only previous experience of death was years ago when she watched her grandmother die in bed. That didn’t really bother her. But Mel’s death was traumatic. His funeral was grim and freezing. Grief was a foreign country. ‘I couldn’t cope. I was always putting things in the wrong place, like keys in the washing machine. You’re not yourself. You’re ill. I felt raw and only wanted to eat nursery food, undemanding things like mashed potato and leek soup. I became terribly working class and wanted lots of roll-ups and sweet tea, which I hate. I was pole-axed by the loss. ‘I went through my answerphone tape hoping to hear him talking about normal things. But he wasn’t on it.’ She looks forlorn. ‘I miss the long conversation we had which lasted 10 years and was just interrupted from time to time.’

People, says Deborah, don’t realise it’s necessary to be much alone in grief, to think about the deceased. ‘The nearest equivalent is having a baby. When you give birth, you need to concentrate on the pain to get through it. With death, you need to be undistracted. You don’t want to go anywhere. Even crossing the street you feel vulnerable and naked.’ SHE says she didn’t turn to drink or tranquillisers. ‘I love drink but I’m not a great drunk.’ And she managed to write a poignant account of Mel’s death just days later. She feared it a terrible invasion, a cathartic plundering of his death. ‘But I’m glad I did it. I wanted to record this terrible moment from the front line.’

She feels ‘normal’ now. ‘The recovery process was revved up because we didn’t have any unfinished business. We didn’t have anything left which we hadn’t said,’ she says, shaking slightly. She can conceive of a relationship with another man. ‘I won’t find anybody like Mel. But I can imagine a future with somebody else.’

But she doesn’t see herself as sexually attractive. ‘I do if I’m tarted up. But underneath I’m a mess,’ she says, bringing her knees up foetally under her chin. ‘Often I feel that I’m a pretend woman and underneath I don’t really know how to do it, sex or being a woman, and that I’m going to get found out.’ She recognises that such self deprecation requires some self confidence and may simply be an elaborate self deception.

We talk then about her ex-husband, Tony, a publisher whom she left in 1985 for Mel. The divorce was traumatic and she lost weight badly. Now relations are friendly and he lives in the next street for the children’s sake. (Tom, 18, and Lottie, 17.) ‘You are parents until you die,’ she says. Deborah, third of four daughters of writer parents, is laissez faire with her offspring. How would she react if they took drugs? ‘I only took acid because it was the Sixties and to give myself street cred with my children,’ she says, unconvincingly. ‘I wouldn’t like them to, but everyone smokes pot. I don’t have strong feelings about that.’

Had Deborah had that surrogate baby, it might now be friends with her children. ‘I’ve never talked to them about it. But I’m terribly glad I didn’t do it,’ she says. ‘It would have opened a can of worms. One jumps into things in a flood of emotional warm feelings, generosity, sexual desire or whatever. But it would be fantastically difficult to see your child being brought up by somebody else.’

And what would it have been like to have slept with her sister’s boyfriend? ‘Technically it would have been adultery. But it’s when it gets to be adultery emotionally that it becomes interesting.’ Was it not a taboo? Something perilously close to incest? Perhaps an extreme manifestation of sibling rivalry? She replies with waffle. Deborah is normally searingly honest.

Her frankness, she admits, is a strategy to distract people from asking her things she doesn’t want to talk about…

BALLERINA Bryony Brind is talking for the first time about her relationship with Prince Michael of Kent and of the death in a climbing accident of the man she planned to marry. About being violently mugged in London last week and about her psychic abilities and plans to marry on a cliff top. And of her youth when she was the Royal Ballet’s youngest star, Rudolph Nureyev’s partner and hailed as the new Margot Fonteyn.

But she won’t elaborate on the house she wants to build, constructed of water.

When I arrive at Glyndebourne, where she’s rehearsing for the principal role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, she’s walking the dogs with her mother. Bryony, ‘roughly’ 33 years old, in baggy track suit and leg warmers, 5ft 5in and with wrist-sized hips, picks her way balletically across the mud. Then she sits on the grass in elegant yoga-cum-ballet position.

Not so long ago she was reported to have sought comfort in the company of Prince Michael of Kent, 51, who took her out to exclusive restaurants while Princess Michael, known for her marital rows and tendresses for foreign men, was in the Bahamas working on her new book. The Prince and Bryony were oft spotted sharing a quiet table in Julies Restaurant in Holland Park, sometimes until 1am.

‘I met the Prince at the house of a friend, another dancer, one evening,’ says Bryony, answering reluctantly. ‘He’s the most charming man, has got time for everybody and the smallest things excite him. That’s really special. It would be so easy to take things for granted.’ What does he appreciate in her? ‘I’ve no idea,’ she says, stumbling. ‘He’s just a casual acquaintance really.’ And one with whom she dined four times in just one month? ‘Who’s counting?’ (Unamused laugh.) Can she describe her relationship with him? ‘Can I describe our relationship? Excuse me sucking away on this thing here (a Thermos flask). Oh, we’re purely friends.’ Did Princess Michael laugh off the press coverage or stop Bryony seeing her husband? ‘She was the one who suggested he call me up because she was away at the time.’ Why? ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe different sort of company from what he’s used to.’

DIDN’T Bryony think there would be problems about intimate but public dinners with a married Royal? ‘No, because I really believe it’s possible to be friends with a man. He’s in no way after me and I’m not after him. He’s married, apart from anything else.’ Has she ever had an affair with a married man? She laughs. ‘Not yet.’

Poor Bryony was also linked in the Press with Nick Allott, 36, the estranged husband of Anneka Rice, when Anneka wanted a reconciliation. ‘But I’ve known Nick for years and years.’ So it wasn’t a romance? ‘I don’t think so, no.’ And she laughs again.

Once voted one of the most beautiful women in London, Bryony has natural red hair, a wide mouth, troubled brown eyes and exerts a strange fascination over men. Her face often looks heavy. ‘I suppose I’m sad. I feel like a tumble drier inside.’

In fact, she’s remained resolutely single since the tragic death of Jonathan, a landscape gardener she’d hoped to marry and who died in a fall in the Alps in 1989. ‘He was like a soul mate. We were childhood friends and went out for two years. I called him my ‘ray of sunshine’ because of his wonderful blond hair and fantastic joie de vivre. I think I was in love with him.

‘Then he went on an activity holiday while I collapsed in the sun. When I got back, his father rang and said in a terribly blunt, matter-of-fact way that he’d died. I still don’t believe he’s not here, because he is here. I still talk to him. There’s always a seat for him at table. I’m always saying things to him like, ‘You were right,” she laughs. ‘It’s a totally different relationship now. It’s almost got better, if that doesn’t sound terribly callous. I think we’re closer now than we were. I keep finding little notes from him which mean so much more now.’

She was profoundly affected by his death and dealt ‘badly’ with it. ‘I cut off from his family. I started socialising with people much older than me who I didn’t identify with. I just wanted to get out and see as many people as I could but wasn’t looking for anyone to have a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with. Now it’s changed and I’m back in the running. I’ve got my feelers out.’

But things have gone badly. Last Thursday she was waiting outside for her dinner date at Julies when she was mugged by a teenager, dragged 20 yards along the pavement on her coccyx and badly bruised. He took the £700 she had for a season ticket. ‘Not a lot of money to pay for my life.’ But she’s traumatised. ‘I keep seeing him, keep reliving it, keep thinking if only … I’m nervy and jumpy. I can’t lie on my back because it’s so painful. But dancing hurts only marginally more than it would anyway.’

Bryony, who is superstitious and tends to see signs and portents in things, has discarded the outfit she was wearing. ‘You start thinking, did that have something to do with it …’ And her pearls. ‘They signify tears. I never normally wear them.’ Instead she’s wearing a crystal her mother (around whom she sees a white aura) gave her. Last week she tried to see a fortune teller. She appears to want to find answers and an order and meaning in things, to make sense of her emotional turmoil.

Her mother, an artist who teaches yoga, joined her over the weekend to look after her and is driving her the four hours a day to and from rehearsals. Why doesn’t she stay in Sussex? ‘I have two cats I can’t leave in London.’

Bryony was once the chosen partner of Rudolph Nureyev. ‘He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Originally I was terrified of him, but he became a mentor, supporter and friend.’ But the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan by-passed her, the roles dried up and she left the Royal Ballet in 1991, diversifying her career into acting and modelling. It has been tough parting from a company in which she’d become institutionalised – ‘You just work as hard as you possibly can and they tell you what to do’ – and where people had known her since she was 11. ‘My self-confidence has always been low. I was like a little girl. Now I have to be somebody else.’ She’s now dancing in opera for the first time.

She’s intensely self-critical (‘At ballet school you were never told you were any good’); has tunnel vision (‘I blank out my problems. That’s how I handle them’); and is a perfectionist, meeting the inexorable demands of her job and seeing her body as ‘a vehicle, an instrument’. She denies being bulimic or anorexic but dislikes her physique, thinking she has a double chin and saying: ‘Dancing, you have to look at your body every day, which is bad enough at the best of times.’

SHE pretends to be more vulnerable than she is, is eager to please, astute and delightful company. We return to her love life. Is she unhappy not having a romance? ‘I suppose I am. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. It will happen, I’m sure.’

Is she lonely? “No, I’m hardly ever at home, always going out.” She wants to marry, eventually, in a Cornish clifftop church. “Before, I wanted to marry outside on the rocks.” And she wants to have children before she is 41. “Dancers seem to be able to have them much later.”

BRITT Ekland, a lover with stamina, once stayed in bed with her soon to be ex-husband drummer Jim McDonnell for two days and nights. Before him, she slept with Peter Sellers (whom she married), Lou Adler, Rod Stewart, Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, Lord Lichfield and George Hamilton. Now she’s written a bonkbuster, Sweet Life, which echoes her own life and is about a Swedish air hostess who marries an English Lord who dies and leaves her penniless and ready for adventure… But Britt’s real life story is of a beautiful woman who protects her vulnerability with an iron will and compulsive need to control.

Britt, 51, is a consummate professional, posing expertly in nearly fluorescent green Versace jacket, tiny skirt, high heels and smiling winningly with enormous eyes and shining capped teeth. She’s a perfectionist, an obsessive and a former bulimic. ‘Almost everyone in the Seventies was,’ she says. ‘They’d eat loads of sweets and throw up or have a huge dinner and go, ‘aaaggghhh, this is disgusting’, and chuck it up.’ These days she never eats breakfast or lunch. ‘I can go for days without food.’ She’s now an exercise-aholic. ‘It’s like my security blanket,’ she says. ‘Last year I was running four miles a day then doing three hours of Polates exercises, then weightlifting.’ Her watch is set 20 minutes fast – as, apparently, are all the clocks in her home – which makes her ruthlessly efficient. If she comes in the door and an object is an inch out of place, she cannot take her coat off until she’s ordered it.

She looks tremendous, although she stays awake at night thinking she should be thinner. She’s chopped her hair, to stick up two fingers (which she does, literally) at people’s expectations. She hasn’t had plastic surgery for 12 years, since she did the bags under her eyes. She’s no fluffy blonde, no fool, has a sharp sense of humour and at the beginning of the interview interlocks her fingers tensely, shakes almost imperceptibly and crosses her arms and legs tightly. She’s ornamental and wears a ring even on her thumb. I notice it when she flicks her hand dismissively at the waiter.

But say ‘Britt’ and people think ‘sex’. ‘I enjoy sex and I’ve had wonderful sex,’ she says. ‘But it’s more difficult for me, Britt Ekland, to have a fling than for anybody else. The media would never leave me alone.’ She’s a firm believer in the Myth of Britt, is this actress who’s done an exercise video and has a chat show on Swedish television. She promotes herself, endearingly I think, in Californian style.

She split up from Peter Sellers, whom she married ‘about 10 days after meeting him’, when she was 25. ‘It was a manic marriage. I was madly in love with him but never knew whether he was going to kiss me or give me the cold shoulder. He abused me mentally, which is as bad as physical abuse. I tried to commit suicide with his Mogadon. I didn’t really want to kill myself.’ She had a ‘transatlantic relationship’ (and a baby) with Lou Adler. Rod Stewart, she says, broke her heart. ‘I trusted and loved him and he had affairs.’ And Warren Beatty? Is he the great lover he’s made out to be? ‘No’ – surprised – ‘I’ve had better.’

In Sweet Life the heroine has a lesbian affair. ‘I’ve never had one ever. Never really wanted to.’ What draws men to her? ‘God, I think after dark probably I draw them more,’ she laughs, dirtily.

‘It’s because I’m an enigma. One of the problems with you young women is that however gorgeous your body is, you’re still very insecure about what to do and how to do it, the etiquette of lovemaking and the whole package of before and after.’

As a woman becomes older, Britt says, she’s prepared for all eventualities. ‘You’re nice-smelling, clean, have soothing candles and you’re more inventive.”

Britt has three children: six-year-old Thomas Jefferson by Jim, Nicholai, 20, by Lou and Victoria Sellers, 28. She had TJ when she was 45, says she’s an ‘incredible’ older mother and is ‘fine and not at all guilty’ about the fact that none of her children had two parents who stuck together. In 1986 her daughter Victoria was involved in a drugs-related felony and recently she emerged as a high-class prostitute with the notorious Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss. ‘I won’t talk about that.’

‘But what are your feelings, as a mother, about your daughter’s drug addiction and prostitution?’ I ask.

‘She tells me it’s all lies and that she is suing the paper.’ ‘And do you believe her?’

‘As a mother, yes, that is what I choose to believe,’ she says, frostily.

‘If the allegations were true, how would you feel and behave?” ‘I’m a mother. Whatever she’s done, she has my 100 per cent support and I love her as much as I ever did. I mean it.’ Britt believes in God and ‘talks to Him every night’, asking Him to look after her children and get her acting parts.

Her own mother contracted cancer aged 49, recovered and then got Alzheimer’s. She’s been in an institution for 10 years. ‘She’s like a vegetable. I said recently I’d kill her if the law allowed it. That made huge headlines – ‘Britt Ekland Would Like To Kill Her Mother’ – in the streets of Sweden. It was devastating… It’s too hard for me to see her alone, so I go with my three brothers.’ This is the only time Britt shows a chink in her emotional armour.

But I liked her. Outwardly she’s great fun, ‘a very social animal’, and has made herself unafraid. ‘A lot of women are frightened of losing their looks, jobs, husband, children or reputation. I wouldn’t be fazed by any of these.’ She protects herself with bullishness. She’s honest and open, but doesn’t trust people or let anybody close. ‘I don’t let people in. Not even Jim my ex got in there. I’m very guarded.’

She’s built a bastion around herself so that she can be completely in control and unhurt by people. ‘Inside me there’s like a door which is shut. Whatever is in there has to stay where it is. If I open that door, I’ll bring back feelings I haven’t had for a long time.’

JULIA Smith, 29, is marrying sport’s most eligible bachelor, England’s rugby union captain, Will Carling. She’s also dated Eric Clapton. And, at 18, she dropped out of university to live with the then 39-year-old veteran guitarist and millionaire Jeff Beck, erstwhile lover of fabled Sixties model Celia Hammond.

It’s Julia, the ravishing blonde in a see-through skimpy dress, that you see at post-rugby match dinners. (`It wasn’t see-through. The photographers made it look like that with high-powered flash,’ she laughs later.) And public relations girl Julia, now promoting Right Said Fred, Aswad and Vanessa Paradis through her company Hands On PR.

She’s getting married on June 18 in Northamptonshire, with 300 guests and a marquee. `A bit of a bun fight. I’d imagined a small wedding, but I’m the only daughter and the youngest,’ she says. The couple have turned down a reputed £20,000 from Hello! to avoid falling victim to its curse – `I wouldn’t want to be caught on somebody’s coffee table, no way!’ So far, family arguments (`we’re both from very close families’) have been confined to disagreements about the flowers.

The wedding has been a long time coming, as they got engaged in May 1993. `It’s the first Saturday Will has had free of rugby commitments to get married.’ Last year, he went on tour to New Zealand for two months. `We promised to call each other every day, but it ended up being five times a day. A lot of money from New Zealand – each call was a good 20 minutes.’ She coped badly, and had to join him after three weeks.

Julia met him first at a dinner party in 1989. `I didn’t think a lot of him. He didn’t say a word. He was obviously very shy. I felt sorry for him.’ But they became friends (she had just broken up with Jeff), and would call each other when they were depressed.

She says: `I used to get very low. It’s a typical Piscean trait, very emotional and up and down like a yo-yo. I was very much the loner, and would exaggerate things in my mind. Like: `Oh God, work was awful today . . . so I’m going to lose my job’.’

Will took her on their first date only last year, a month after they’d both broken up with their respective partners. A month later, he proposed to her in bed. Initially, she declined because she thought he was joking. Why did it take them four years to get together? `We didn’t tell each other that we liked one other. We’re both very shy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and need encouragement,’ she elaborates. `If people are supportive, I’ll feel better about myself. If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll shy away into a hovel.

`I’m not a party-goer. I don’t like going out, and would rather stay in for the evening. If I go out, I’ve got to be with people I know really well. Otherwise, I’ll close up and daydream, which is my favourite pastime. `If someone is talking, I’ll be a million miles away, travelling to countries in my head or dreaming about my wedding day.’

Her lack of confidence is totally unapparent. Her mother considers her a very good actress; even her body language is relaxed.

Julia’s country childhood was idyllic. She had ponies, and her two elder brothers and father – now a retired chartered accountant – doted on her. `I was very spoilt, and probably still am. I’ve grown out of the stamping my feet syndrome, but I did that until I was about 11.

`I was a horror at primary school, a real tomboy. I used to beat up little girls. I used to get in a panic when they went off crying to teacher, and had to bribe them to stop them snitching on me.’ She grins. Julia `grew up rapidly’ at Oakham Boarding School in Leicestershire. `It was fantastic. It was a mixed school, but there were a lot more boys.’ She showed early signs of being a man’s woman: `I get on better with guys and find it easier to talk to them.’

She worked hard to get eight O-levels and three A-levels: `I wouldn’t say I’m stupid. I’m just average.’

Aged 18, she lost her virginity to Jeff, and left her history degree at Goldsmiths after a term to co-habit. (`I hated university, standing around stupid bars drinking beer.’) There was a 21-year age discrepancy, and they were together for six years. `My parents were very laid back about it.’

But the relationship made her very isolated. `I lost contact with my friends. There was no one of my own age group around me. I was on my own a lot and lonely. It toughened me up.’ She hugs herself. `He wasn’t a father figure. I learned a lot from him, but he wanted me to be a mother to him. I just wasn’t strong enough for that.’ They eventually broke up in 1989. Julia had two serious relationships before Will, neither with well-known men. `I haven’t had that many boyfriends to be quite honest.’ What about Eric Clapton? `We just had a laugh and the media immediately thought . . .’ But did she have an affair with him? `No, he was just a mate.’ Why not? `I didn’t particularly want to.’ She says she wasn’t his confidante, that they don’t keep in touch and she doesn’t want to talk about him. So, back to Will. She says, exhaling deeply, that it’s difficult to say what makes him tick. `He has tremendous drive and ambition. If he wants something, you know damn sure he’s going to get it. He’s less arrogant now, very kind, and thoughtful.’

She sees marriage as a partnership, requiring lashings of trust and honesty. Sexual fidelity is `100 per cent important’ to them both; she doesn’t have a problem with only ever sleeping with him for the rest of her life.

However, she has a `one per cent doubt’ over committing for life – her anxiety is over her own ability to make the marriage work. `If I start being stupid then I’ll lose the relationship. If I don’t pay enough attention to it, work takes over or I start looking elsewhere, for other men, that’s my own fault. But that’s a pretty silly thing to do if you’re going to commit to marriage.

`Because of my lack of confidence, I think maybe he’ll go off me. So I want to make sure that I’m going to be perfect for him for the rest of my life.’

Does she fear divorce? `I can’t see a marriage working if you’re thinking on that level.’

At the moment, they’re living in rented accommodation and house-hunting in west London. She wants to travel before having children. Will, she says, will certainly see his job through until the World Cup next year. They currently appear together in a TV advertisement for Quorn, part of a £5 million campaign for the veggie substitute for meat. The problem is, media sceptics suspect he’s a carnivore. Is he a vegetarian? `No, no, no,’ she says. `But I am. I’ve never liked meat, fish, eggs, cheese or milk. I have an appalling diet. I just eat sweets all day.’

She loathes being categorised as a blonde bimbo, and is annoyed at being known only as the woman who’s marrying Will Carling. Why, then, does she like relationships with celebrities? `There are people who do that on purpose. Dear God, I hope I don’t. Jeff was a celebrity when I was wetting my nappies, not when I went out with him.

She’s engaged to Will Carling, England’s rugby captain, and is busy planning their wedding this summer. But she’s also lived with rock star Jeff Beck and sepped out with Eric Clapton. In her first interview on her own, Julia Smith talks about past loves and her romance with the nation’s most eligible sporting hero.

JULIA Smith, 29, is marrying sport’s most eligible bachelor, England’s rugby union captain, Will Carling. She’s also dated Eric Clapton. And, at 18 years old, she dropped out of university to live with the then 39-year-old veteran guitarist and millionaire Jeff Beck, erstwhile lover of fabled Sixties model Celia Hammond.

It’s Julia, the ravishing blonde in a see-through skimpy dress, that you see at post-rugby match dinners. (‘It wasn’t see-through. The photographers made it look like that with high-powered flash,’ she laughs later.) And public relations girl Julia, now publicising Right Said Fred, Aswad and Vanessa Paradis through her company Hands On PR.

She’s not photogenic and is far prettier in the flesh. Slim, with big brown eyes, gentle features, fluid changes of expression, she’s wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, clumpy, adolescent shoes which she takes off to curl her feet underneath her, and a school pinafore-style dress. She’s instantly likeable, with a lovely friendly voice and easy, enchanting and direct manner.

She’s getting married on 18 June in Northamptonshire, with 300 guests and a marquee. ‘A bit of a bun fight. I’d imagined a small wedding. But I’m the only daughter and the youngest,’ she says. The couple have turned down a reputed £20,000 from Hello! to avoid falling victim to its curse. ‘I wouldn’t want to be caught on somebody’s coffee table, no way!’ This week they’ve been choosing hymns. On Sunday night she was with Will at a business conference where everybody had big clipboards and folders and Will sang a good hymn very flatly. This was actually a dream. ‘Will has to endure a diabolical 10 minutes every morning when I recall my weird dreams. He’d probably just like to say ‘shut up’.’ So far family arguments (‘we’re both from very close families’) have been confined to disagreements about the flowers.

The wedding has been a long time coming, as they got engaged in May 1993. ‘It’s the first Saturday he’s had free of rugby commitments to get married.’ Last year Will went on tour to New Zealand for two months. ‘We promised to call each other every day, but it ended up being five times a day. A lot of money from New Zealand. Each call was a good 20 minutes.’ She coped badly and had to join him after three weeks.

She met him first at a dinner party in 1989. ‘I didn’t think an awful lot of him. He didn’t say a word. He was obviously very shy. I felt sorry for him more than anything.’ But they became friends (she had just broken up with Jeff) and would call each other when they were depressed. SHE says: ‘I used to get very low. It’s a typical Piscean trait, very emotional and up and down like a yo-yo. I was very much the loner and would exaggerate things in my mind. Like, ‘Oh God, work was awful today … so I’m going to lose my job.”

Will took her on her first date only last year, a month after they’d both broken up with their respective partners, she says with a big sigh. A month later, he proposed to her in bed. Initially she declined, because she thought he was joking.

Why did it take them four years to get together? ‘We didn’t tell each other that we liked one other. We’re both very shy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and need encouragement,’ she elaborates. ‘If people are supportive, I’ll feel better about myself. If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll shy away into a hovel.

‘I’m not a party goer. I don’t like going out and would rather stay in in the evening. If I go out, I’ve got to be with people I know really well. Otherwise I’ll close up and daydream, which is my favourite pastime. ‘If someone is talking, I’ll be a million miles away, travelling to countries in my head or dreaming about my wedding day. I’m chirpy and happy on the phone. But if someone says let’s go out for a drink tonight or mix with journalists, I’ll run a mile.’ Her lack of confidence is totally unapparent. Her mother considers her a very good actress; even her body language is relaxed.

Julia’s country childhood was idyllic. She had ponies and her two elder brothers and father, now a retired chartered accountant, doted on her. ‘I was very spoilt and probably still am. I’ve grown out of the stamping my feet syndrome, but I did that until I was about 11. ‘I was a horror at primary school, a real tomboy and always the gang leader. I used to beat up little girls. I used to get in a panic when they went off crying to teacher and bribe them to stop them snitching on me.’ She grins.

She ‘grew up rapidly’ at Oakham Boarding School, Leicestershire. ‘It was fantastic. It was a mixed school but there were a lot more boys.’ She showed early signs of being a man’s woman. ‘I get on better with guys and find it easier to talk to them. I always spoke to my brothers about everything and was my father’s little girl.’ She worked hard to get eight O and three A-levels – ‘I wouldn’t say I’m stupid. I’m just average.’

WHAT happened when she became sexually aware? Aged 18, she lost her virginity to Jeff and left her history degree at Goldsmiths after a term to co-habit. (‘I hated university, standing around stupid bars drinking pints of beer.’) There was a 21-year age discrepancy and they were together for six years. ‘My parents were very laid back about it.’

But the relationship made her very isolated. ‘I lost contact with my friends. There was no one of my age group around me. I was on my own a lot and lonely. It toughened me up.’ She cuddles herself. ‘He wasn’t a father figure. I learned a lot from him, but he wanted me to be a mother to him. I just wasn’t strong enough for that.’ They broke up in 1989.

She had two ‘serious’ relationships before Will, neither with well-known men. ‘I haven’t had that many boyfriends to be quite honest.’ What about Eric Clapton? ‘We just had a laugh and the media immediately thought …’ Did she have an affair with him? ‘No, he was just a mate.’ Why not? ‘I didn’t particularly want to. I didn’t see it as that important.’ She says she wasn’t his confidante, that they don’t keep in touch and she doesn’t want to talk about him.

So, back to Will. She says, exhaling deeply, that it’s difficult to say what makes him tick. ‘He has tremendous drive and ambition. If he wants something, you know damn sure he’s going to get it. He’s less arrogant now, very kind, and thoughtful.’

She sees marriage as a partnership, requiring lashings of trust and honesty. Sexual fidelity is ‘one hundred per cent’ important to them both; she doesn’t have a problem with only ever sleeping with him for the rest of her life; and she has ‘not a clue’ why The Sunday Times asked Will whether he was a repressed homosexual. She has a ‘one per cent’ doubt over committing for life, her anxiety over her own ability to make the marriage work. ‘If I start being stupid then I’ll lose the relationship. If I don’t pay enough attention to it, work takes over or I start looking elsewhere, for other men, that’s my own fault. But that’s a pretty silly thing to do if you’re going to commit to marriage.

‘Because of my lack of confidence, I think maybe he’ll go off me.’ She hugs herself tightly. ‘So I want to make sure that I’m going to be perfect for him for the rest of my life.’ Does she fear divorce? ‘I wouldn’t go into marriage fearing divorce. I can’t see a marriage working if you’re thinking on that level.’

AT THE moment they’re living in rented accommodation, house-hunting in west London and hope eventually to move to the country. She wants to travel before having children. Will, she says, will certainly see his job through until the World Cup next year.

Annie Leibovitz is the star who photographs the stars. Yet she doesn’t come out from behind her lens happily, CAROLINE PHILLIPS discovers.

ANNIE Leibovitz has fixed the look of American popular culture for two decades. She is reputed to earn £1million a year. Annie finds it hard to talk, struggles with her work, worries she’s lost her touch and nearly cried when she walked into her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Annie, 44, has shot heavily pregnant Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, John Cleese hanging upside down in a tree pretending to be a bat and Joan Collins, who pushed her cleavage up with gaffer tape. For magazines from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, she’s spent the past two decades on the road with Mick Jagger, at the White House for Richard Nixon’s departure and with John Lennon, pictured curled foetally round Yoko, hours before he was murdered. Recently, she left Sarajevo to shoot Sylvester Stallone in Los Angeles.

She’s tall and imposing, dressed all in black, with manly looks and long, highlighted hair. Observing is her life – being observed is uncomfortable, talking about her work is difficult and talking about herself is even worse. ‘Talking is relatively new to me. I only started last year,’ she laughs, holding herself protectively and avoiding eye contact. ‘Working with people was a problem, too. It was making me angry. I didn’t like explaining. I don’t think I’m articulate.’

She keeps on the sidelines in her personal life as well. ‘It’s a battle to stay involved. I like to be there, but I don’t like to participate.’ She never married or had children. ‘It’s just something that slipped by. I didn’t notice if people were attracted to me or not. It’s not something I know how to deal with. Anyway, it’s not over completely yet.’ She adds that she has lots of supportive friends, an extended family and a full life. Has she ever lived with anyone? ‘No. Well, maybe my first boyfriend for a few minutes. Even if I met somebody I wanted to be with, I think we’d live in separate houses, perhaps with a bridge.’

When was the last time she had a relationship? ‘I’m not answering these questions,’ she says, spikily. Is she self-sufficient and scared of intimacy? ‘Next question.’ Her best friend is Susan Sontag, who encouraged her professionally when she didn’t feel strong five years ago. Annie joked once about buying children. ‘That was definitely a joke,’ she says. ‘But I might adopt eventually. I’ll have to decide in the next few years. I love Chinese babies, Oriental babies, their eyes are so beautiful.” One of six children, she was the daughter of an air force colonel. She developed a drive, which, like her drug-taking during the Stones era, seems obsessive.

‘After my childhood, it’s funny you call it my ‘drive’,’ she laughs. ‘Because I was raised in a car. At least, that’s what it felt like. We travelled all over. I thought changing your environment and keeping on the move could solve all your problems.’

When she first worked, she says she ‘didn’t know who I was’. Her push and itinerant lifestyle kept such feelings at bay. ‘Keeping moving is necessary for me. I find it hard to stay still. I’m just starting to slow down.’ Her success has been hard earned. ‘I worked in a vacuum for many years, not noticing that people were noticing me. I was scared of not working. It’s been a sacrifice.’ She is spirited and strong, but she suffers from lack of confidence.

‘Sure, all the time. If I hadn’t taken a good picture, I used to be miserable until I did. And I used to make the people around me miserable, too. It doesn’t get any easier. I’m only just learning to enjoy it.’ SHE talks me round her exhibition, past witty and imaginative Vanity Fair pictures, on to new directions. There are striking images of HIV-positive women who use body paint as therapy. ‘That’s what those women feel like when they walk down the street. As if their insides are painted on their outsides.’

Landscapes of Monument Valley. ‘Often when I take location photographs, I regret having to put the person in the picture later.’ And images of Sarajevo where she went on her own, twice, for 11 days. ‘Unlike Lebanon, you can’t leave the front and drive away. Sure I was scared, but it’s like being in a bowl, you have a false sense of security.”

She won’t talk about the millions her photographs reputedly bring her. Because people might envy her? ‘Money isn’t important. The money I make pays for the overheads.’ So she’s not rich? ‘I’m not. Believe me, it surprises me.’

But she will talk about her fame. ‘I found it unsettling walking the streets of Washington doing the presidential inauguration and being recognised.’ The corollary is that she gets work (like photographing the Olympic hopefuls) because she’s well known.

‘I’d be stupid to say I wasn’t totally enjoying this, the National Portrait Gallery. I’m so surprised, I came to the door and felt like crying. But I think their recognition has come a little early. I know this sounds corny, but I feel like I’m just starting. The best work is ahead.’ It’ll be worth the drive…