Britt pops in - Britt Ekland interview

Wife of Peter Sellers, Bond girl, paramour of Rod Stewart, wild child, rock chick, Britt Ekland will have a lot to talk about when she brings her one-woman show to the Fringe next month. But the turning point of her life happened far from the headlines and glamour, hears Jackie McGlone

THE other day Britt Ekland went to see Sex and the City: The Movie. She found it profoundly depressing. "Sadly, nothing's changed for women," sighs the Swedish actress, who married the legendary comic actor Peter Sellers when she was only 21. The idea that hooking a rich man and having closets full of designer clothes and killer heels will make a woman happy is anathema to her.

"What about love?" asks the svelte 65-year-old, whose many lovers have included Hollywood royalty, such as Warren Beatty and the late society photographer Lord Lichfield. She was also married to Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom.

"I did it all for love – I was never with a man I didn't love passionately," she says. "I was absolutely 100 per cent in love with Peter, although life with him was not easy.

"And I was loved in return, sometimes jealously, unbelievably so. That was how Peter was. If another man – however old, fat and ugly – looked at me, he went crazy.

"I know now, of course, that he was bipolar, which caused so much unhappiness, because he could be so unstable."

Today, the former Bond girl – she was Mary Goodnight to Roger Moore's 007 in The Man With the Golden Gun – is contentedly single. "There's only me and my baby," she says, petting her cute Chihuahua, Tequila, who accompanies her everywhere and who will be her constant companion when she comes to Edinburgh next month to maker her debut at the Fringe.

Her one-woman show, Britt On Britt, is the story of her life from birth to the present.

Inevitably, it will feature her years as a wild child, the ultimate rock chick, when she was perhaps the most pulchritudinous of the blondes on Rod Stewart's conveyor belt, as well as her concerted efforts to escape the sex-kitten pigeon-hole into which she was filed for many years.

The very thought of being described thus reduces her to a fit of the giggles. "A glamour puss at my age? Pah! I'm not even an old sex moggie, although I can still flirt," she says, with a throaty laugh. Theoretically, she may be an OAP, but she still looks absolutely fabulous.

She's expensively groomed, immaculately coiffed and perfectly made up for our interview and the photo-shoot in, of all places, a Baptist church hall in Camberwell, where she's rehearsing Britt On Britt.

And, boy, can she still flirt – with both the camera and the photographer! Decades of practice, I guess. She's swapped her long, floaty skirt and cowboy boots for towering heels and a glitzy gold bomber jacket.

Slim as a reed, she's retained her legendary hourglass figure into her seventh decade, despite having had three children. Indeed, her younger son, Thomas Jefferson (20), was born when she was in her mid-forties.

At one point as we talk she grips her wasp waist with her fingers and it's only a handspan around. Curses!

She works hard to stay looking good. "I'm very healthy; I eat all the right things; I power-walk and I take care of my hair and skin. I've come to terms with growing older. The years between 55 and 60 were terrible for me," she confides. Her luscious beauty began to wane and she mourned the passing of something she's always regarded as a great blessing. "I've said it many times and I'll say it again to you, beauty is not a curse."

She adds: "However, inevitably it fades – although I have no problems with people having work done on their faces. People have asked me if I've had collagen implants in my lips. That's my business, I tell them.

"Nonetheless, it's the inner woman that matters. As you age you have to find inner strengths and exploit your God-given talents. I blossomed at 60; it was a turning point for me because I accepted growing older and I finally became me, the true Britt."

So who is the true Britt then? A woman who divides her time between her work and her homes in Sweden, LA and London – where she shares a house with three men and is romantically linked with none of them! A woman who enjoys everything.

"I have the most wonderful children, my daughter Victoria, who I had with Peter, and my two sons. My older son, Nikolai (35), whose father is the record producer Lou Adler, is marrying later this year. I long for grandchildren; I can't wait to become a grandmother," she says.'

She'll certainly be a drop-dead glamorous one. "I guess I'll always have to look the part; it comes with the territory and being Britt Ekland," she says, adding that, recently, she spent more than an hour being interviewed by a man from a big, quality British newspaper.

He wrote that she obviously wanted to live in a nice house with a white picket fence and to drive a Volvo. "A Volvo! Not that there's anything wrong with Volvos, but that's so not me.

"He simply didn't get me. He spends all this time with me, then writes that. Pswah!"

A Scandinavian hausfrau the gorgeous Ekland is not. Perhaps such addled perceptions about her is one reason she's telling her story on stage? "Oh, there's no point. Whatever I tell journalists they write the same things about me."

They ignore the fact that she speaks four languages fluently, for example. Sex symbols aren't supposed to have brains, even obedient girls like her who would take off her clothes just because a film's director asked her to. She had a body double for the erotic horror movie The Wicker Man, in which she played a nymphomaniac, although as she points out, "the fat a**" that appeared on screen was not hers.

Looking back at those times for her show has brought back many memories, some deeply unhappy, some of times when she was blissfully happy. She can't get over how young and innocent she was when she married Sellers, for instance.

"I'd had such a protected, happy childhood. Nothing bad had ever happened in my life. I had never seen blood. I had never known death or sickness, although that came years later when my mother was struck down by Alzheimer's.

"She suffered dreadfully – it's one of the reasons I take care of myself now because I don't want to end up as she did; it was heartbreaking.

"But when I met Peter, I really was an innocent abroad. Of course I was not a virgin; I was 21 and he was 39, but I was inexperienced in the ways of the world. Also, I looked about 15. And he liked very young women. Indeed, the older he got, the younger they got after we divorced."

Oddly enough, by the time she was 40, she was married to a much younger man, Jim McDonnell aka Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, with whom she had her younger son.

"I was so very, very happy with Jim, although he was 19 years younger than me. In the end, we wanted different things from life. We split in the 1990s and I've been single ever since, which is not say that I've not had boyfriends. But that's the past."

Living in the past makes women bitter and twisted, she believes. "Who wants to end up with a disappointed face? Regrets? I have none. Well, one: I regret that my beautiful daughter Victoria has had her troubles, although she's fine now."

Party girl Victoria (43) was caught up in the Heidi Fleiss Hollywood prostitution scandal and was jailed, including for drug-related offences. "She's very happy in a wonderful, stable relationship and she has a great career as a jewellery designer. She made this for me," says Ekland, showing me her beautiful chunky gold and emerald necklace, embellished with crucifixes.

"It's tough being the child of famous parents and Victoria struggled with that. She called me last night to tell me she's finally had her teeth fixed – I've been nagging her because it's years since she saw a dentist and now it's cost her. But I'm proud of her; she has talent and she's using it brilliantly. Her past is behind her."

Personally, Ekland is delighted that she's a woman with a past: "I believe in fate. I planned nothing, therefore I believe my life has turned out exactly the way it was meant to. I am where I want to be."

• Britt On Britt, Assembly @ George Street, July 31-25 August.

BRITT AND ROD: A ROCK 'N ROLL LOVE STORY

JOAN COLLINS introduced Britt Ekland to the half-Scottish singer Rod Stewart at a party in LA in 1975. Ekland was 32 and Stewart two years younger. Their relationship quickly became serious and they went on to live together for more than two years. The relationship was evidently intense: '"Rod regarded every orgasm as a testimony of his love for me,'" Ekland said in her 1980 autobiography, True Britt, and she put her own acting career on hold to accompany him on tour.

Ekland also made her inimitable mark on his musical career: Stewart wore her underwear on stage, ensuring no visible panty line in his skin-tight trousers. She whispered sweet nothings in French on his 1976 hit Tonight's the Night'. However, the relationship faltered and ended bitterly in 1977, as a result of Stewart's infidelity. Not long before they split up, the singer had recorded one of his best-loved songs, You're in My Heart, whose sentimental lyric was inspired by Ekland.

Ekland sued Stewart for $12 million palimony in a case settled out of court. Despite having flings with a series of younger men – including the Bay City Rollers' lead singer, Les McKeown – she maintains: "I was more frenetically in love with Rod Stewart than with any other man, past or present. Our relationship was a fantasy from the beginning, like a comet in the sky, but one which I never thought would burn to earth.'"