And why not? His delicious barbs

On Arnold Schwarzenegger: ‘He’s not an actor, he’s a human special effect.’ Norman also called him ‘an ass’ and ‘a humourless, selfsatisfied clod’.

On Robert de Niro: Norman said he and de Niro ‘almost came to blows’. ‘He got up my nose. I got up his nose. He stormed out of the room and I chased after him. We both snarled at each other and I thought I’d better let it go. He was a lot younger than me and a lot fitter than me. I could have been in deep trouble.’ On Die Hard star Bruce Willis: ‘A fairly considerable plonker.’

On comic Robin Williams: ‘An enormous talent which could sometimes be spread so thinly as to be almost invisible.’

On Sean Connery: Norman met the Scot for the first time at a railway station in Paris. He asked about his next role. ‘Connery replied: ‘‘Och, I’m playing James Bond.” But he really didn’t seem too enthusiastic about it. He said: “Well, it’s a job.” Next time I met him, he’s a bloody international superstar.’

On Charlotte Rampling: ‘Not for her the frozen look of a china doll. She wears the lines and wrinkles of her age with pride, confident that they don’t diminish her attractiveness. She amply demonstrates how women can retain their sex appeal — without a surgeon’s intervention.’

On the 1942 cartoon film Bambi: ‘The most tragic sequence in cinema is, without doubt, the death of Bambi’s mother.’