'Billy Wilder compared me to Marilyn Monroe...trouble is, he couldn't stand her'   She starred in the original Upstairs, Downstairs, before dazzling Hollywood. Lesley-Anne Down speaks to The Lady about dinner with Fred Astaire, turning down a lift from Peter Fonda – and her beloved pet tortoise Franklin

By Barbra Paskin

Lesley-Anne Down is feeling blue. The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations are still fresh in her memory, and she remains in the throes of severe homesickness. ‘If you ask me what I miss about England,’ she says with a sniffle, ‘it’s the Queen. I really miss Her Majesty, and I miss the Royal Family. They are England, and they will be forever England.’

She sighs with a tinge of regret. ‘I watched a two-hour special on CNN last night, and when it was over, I watched it all over again. My husband had to go to bed without me. “I guess you’re missing England!” he said, and left me in front of the TV. He’s right.’

She sniffs again. Not because she’s feeling weepy but because she has that rare summer phenomenon, a Californian cold. She catches sight of her face in a mirror and shudders. ‘Oh gosh, just look at me. I look terrible. This cold has really settled in. I can’t hear, I can’t breathe, I can hardly see, and my eyes are bright red.’

I really don’t notice anything beyond her exquisite English beauty. She still looks sensational, despite a terrifying battle with breast cancer a couple of years ago. She has skin like porcelain and looks a good decade younger than her 58 years. Some of that may be due to her unashamed appreciation of the cosmetic filler Botox, a pleasure she has never tried to hide. To the contrary, she exhorts its qualities with a persuasive passion.

She’s just come inside from tending the hydrangeas that grow in colourful profusion in the English-style garden at her Malibu home, and now it’s teatime. The teapot’s warming on the stove, the kettle’s on the boil, and a plate of biscuits waits invitingly.

Lesley-Anne has lived in America on and off ever since Hollywood beckoned in the 1970s, after her triumphant two-year run in the original Upstairs, Downstairs. Who could forget her endearing portrayal of heartbreaker Lady Georgina Worsley? Pundits tipped her as the next Elizabeth Taylor. Although only 17, she was already a familiar face. She began modelling at the age of 10, had parts in commercials, and was partying by the age of 12. A captivating teenager, she flounced away with several beauty contestsand, by 15, had appeared in four films, was living with writer Bruce Robinson and had become the darling of the British press.

When Lady Georgina came calling, Upstairs, Downstairs had been on the air for two years. An unprecedented success, it was watched weekly by one billion viewers in 70 countries. Lesley- Anne was among them.

When Lady Georgina came calling, Upstairs, Downstairs had been on the air for two years. An unprecedented success, it was watched weekly by one billion viewers in 70 countries. Lesley- Anne was among them.

‘I was addicted to the show,’ she says laughing as she pours tea into elegant china cups. ‘I loved all those people in it, and I believed in it. When I got the part, I was beside myself. I’m thrilled they made a new series, especially for Jean Marsh. It was her baby.’

Her voice softens, and a dreamy look comes over her face as she recalls those heady early days. ‘The memories I have of it are just how nice everybody was, how there were no egos. Nobody ever threw a fit, nobody ever had an argument. It was the most English of experiences. Nobody had any kind of feeling that they had to be better than somebody else. We were a family, and we looked after one another,’ she says.

‘I’m still close to Jacqueline Tong, who played Daisy, the scullery maid,’ she continues. ‘We had our first episode together, and we’re the same age. And Simon Williams [James Bellamy] and I see each other occasionally. Well, actually every eight years or so.’

Ultimately, her character married Anthony Andrews’s dashing Lord Stockbridge. But her true affections lay with her charismatic step-cousin, James. And the steamy flirting between her and Simon Williams kept tensions sky high. ‘

We really liked each other, both on and off screen. We kept asking them to let us have an affair in the show or do something romantic together. But they said, “You’re cousins – of course you can’t have an affair. It wouldn’t be acceptable.”’

After Upstairs, Downstairs, Lesley-Anne made The Pink Panther Strikes Again with Peter Sellers. The film kick-started a streak of movies that pitted her with some of acting’s highest profiles, from Laurence Olivier to John Wayne.

Hollywood came knocking with all its beefcake might. She landed top roles, co-starring with macho males Burt Reynolds (with whom she had an affair), Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. But for the hottest English import since Julie Andrews, Hollywood turned out to be less than the glamorous Shangri-La she had anticipated.

‘I remember when I arrived here, I was driven to Kirk Douglas’s house in Beverly Hills. I was staying with him while making Scalawag, which he directed and starred in. As we were driving from the airport, I was thinking, “Oh my God, this is horrible. This is so ugly.” There were these awful one-storey Taco Bell-style buildings, which were tacky and looked like the wind would blow them over. It wasn’t at all like you saw in the movies, and I remember being hugely disappointed. It still is like that. Unless the sun comes out, it’s really quite ugly, a lot of it.’

But nothing could dim her excitement about meeting some of the movie stars she’d grown up watching. From Gary Cooper to Ginger Rogers, she found herself in their midst.

‘When I met Fred Astaire and had dinner with him, I was completely overwhelmed,’ she says. Then there was dinner with Mae West… ‘I could hardly speak I was so starstruck.’

‘All those movie stars young people today have not heard of… If you were to introduce me to anybody under the age of 25 who’s being paid $50m or more for a film and is on the cover of every magazine, I probably wouldn’t really know who they are. And would it impress me? No. But introduce me to anyone in a wheelchair who made a movie in the 1950s, and I will be gaga.’

There was one memorable evening when she found herself sitting next to ‘this darling old man at dinner’. They exchanged pleasantries, and he told her she was the only actress he’d ever met who had qualities like Marilyn Monroe. The man was Billy Wilder, who had directed Marilyn in Some Like It Hot. ‘He really HATED Marilyn, it turned out,’ laughs Lesley- Anne. ‘And there I was, wondering whether it was a compliment!’

But it wasn’t easy for this caretaker’s daughter from Putney. ‘It was like getting on an ice rink in the dark with only one skate, never having stepped foot on one before.’

As Phyllis in The One And Only Phyllis Dixey

She got used to men trying to pick her up. One afternoon she was standing at the entrance of Universal Studios waiting for a taxi, when a handsome young man in a sports car pulled up. The stranger offered her a ride. ‘Of course I didn’t get into cars with strange men, so I told him no, thank you very much, goodbye.’ As he drove away, the studio guard remarked to her, ‘Do you know who that was, honey?’ ‘A man in a sports car,’ replied Lesley-Anne blithely. ‘That was Peter Fonda,’ he told her.

Alice in Wonderland it wasn’t. Some men turned out to be ‘vipers’. One in particular caused her much grief. To this day, she refuses to name him. ‘He was very famous. Got me into a tricky situation in his house. I think the butler had something to do with it.’

She had gone to a dinner party there and was in the bedroom, but ‘Mr So-and-So was waiting upstairs. All of a sudden I heard the door lock and he was in the shower. It was obnoxious. I think it made me hate men. I can’t say I like men very much. Not many of them.’ She smiles sweetly. ‘Like tortoises, I suppose. I never really thought of tortoises before I got Franklin. But now I quite like them.’

Franklin is the latest addition to the family. He was found wandering in a neighbour’s garden, long after the neighbour had moved. Stricken that he might not have eaten in months, Lesley-Anne promptly adopted him. ‘He’s very special. He’s 35, you know. That’s pretty good. We dream about him now.’ She laughs raucously. ‘We wake up in the morning and compare tortoise dreams. It’s all quite pathetic really!’

She’s been married three times, first to film technician Henri Gabriel, then most infamously to director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), a marriage that produced son Jack (now 30) but ended three years later in a nasty divorce, which cost each of them $1m.

For the last 27 years, she’s been happily married to photographer and director Don FauntLeRoy, whom she met when he was the cameraman on North And South, the TV series she made with Patrick Swayze. They have a son, George, 14.

Until a couple of months ago, Lesley-Anne had enjoyed an eightyear run on the popular US soap, The Bold And The Beautiful. Now she’s back in front of the movie cameras, with two new movies lined up for release later this year.

But in a shocking revelation, just as I’m about to take my leave of her, she suddenly drops a bombshell and admits to me that she’s thinking of packing it all in. After a lifetime of acting, she says she’s ready to walk away from her profession.

‘I just think I don’t really want to do this any more,’ she tells me quietly. ‘It’s never made me happy. I’ve never felt very good at it. It’s always made me feel insecure. It’s been good to me financially – and that’s about it.

‘I don’t have any of that necessity for my ego to be stroked or my ego to be fulfilled. And, honestly and truly, if people say anything good to me about anything I’ve done, it does the reverse. It makes me think they’re lying. I guess because I don’t feel it for myself.’

And so this English beauty hovers on the verge of a new life. Quite what it will be she doesn’t yet know.

‘I guess you’d say I’m in discovery mode right now,’ she laughs at her rare American turn of phrase. ‘It’s a new day. It’s time for change. And change is always exciting!'