I haven’t had sex for 20 years, says Britt
The 73-year-old ex-Bond beauty on how plastic surgery destroyed her looks and why today she’ll only share her bed with her chihuahua
Margaret and Lord Snowdon and he was devastated when she left him), Warren Beatty (in her 1980 autobiography True Britt, she said he was ‘the most divine lover of all’ with a ‘lethal libido’), and she was briefly engaged in 1981 to a rock star called Phil Lewis.
Britt clearly loves a bad boy and, in 1975, they didn’t come any badder than Rod Stewart.
During the two torrid years they were together, they became one of the most celebrated and photographed couples of the age, the Posh and Becks of their day.
It was Britt who applied Rod’s increasingly outlandish make-up and encouraged him into satin trousers so tight he had to wear her knickers on stage to avoid VPL.
You could say it was a passionate romance. In True Britt, she details how he once slapped her, and she punched him right back.
They made love up to four times a day, sometimes becoming so overcome with lust that they would leave the table at their own dinner parties, returning in time for fruit salad and coffee.
It did not end well. Despite the fact that she ran his household in his grand LA mansion, Rod charged Britt $100 a month for her keep.
The only present he bought her was a ‘most unattractive thin gold bracelet with three teeny weeny diamonds’. It sounds like the rumours of his meanness are not exaggerated — ‘I leave it up to you,’ says Britt, primly.
She put her career on hold to be with Rod (‘I didn’t know any better at the time’) and, when he was unfaithful to her with Alana Hamilton, the woman who would become his first wife, she sued him for $12 million in palimony, in one of the first cases of its kind. She later regretted doing so, and they settled out of court for less than $500,000.
Uniquely, among the men in her life, Rod is the only one with whom she is not on good terms.
‘I am not a vengeful or bitter person, but I have a feeling that he dislikes me intensely,’ she says of the man who wrote two millionselling hits about her — Tonight’s The Night and You’re In My Heart.
The days of Britt starring in Hollywood films are probably over, but she’s not bitter about this, either. Somehow she has always managed to make a living for herself, and her work lately has included Christmas pantos, television appearances and reality shows. She has an exciting project lined up, which she cannot talk about, but I do admire her energy and fortitude, and the fact that she has survived it all with a smile.
‘I am immensely brave,’ she says. ‘I could have become an alcoholic, a drug addict or a mental wreck.
‘I could have killed myself, but I didn’t. I got on with it, I had a career, I persisted. When things went wrong in my life, I pretended I was fine. When my face got wrecked, I learned how to pose and smile so that it didn’t show too much. I kept going because I had to.’
That much is clear, for underneath her wasp waist and baby blue wombat eyes, beneath her pelvic power and her tiny, fragile hands, lurks a woman hewn from solid Swedish steel. Her car is crumpled, her Tequila has arthritis, her face is not what it was — but Britt has grit, and glories on regardless.
BRITT EKLAND is not what you think, particularly if you think of the former Bond Girl and Swedish sex kitten as just another ageing beauty with a sizzling past — an actress of a certain age with candy floss hair, pink nails and a pet chihuahua tucked under her arm. Well, she is all that, but she is so much more, too.
‘I was brought up very strictly, I was brought up with impeccable manners. I had an impeccable education,’ says the woman who counts Peter Sellers, Rod Stewart, Warren Beatty, Lou Adler, George Hamilton and Lord Lichfield among her menagerie of husbands, lovers and conquests.
Not that 73-year-old Britt is still interested in that sort of thing.
‘I haven’t been interested in sex for about 20 years. I am not looking for anyone and I don’t want to be in a relationship.
‘I sleep in king-sized beds exclusively in my homes in Sweden and LA, so that my tequila has enough room.’ Her tequila? ‘My dog — that’s his name. I just want Tequila. I don’t want to wake up with a man in the bed, passing wind and snoring and with bad breath and all the rest of it, in his dirty underwear. No thank you!’
Where was I? Oh, yes. Britt is of a generation of women who wore white gloves in summer; she has worked since she was 14, speaks four languages, skis like a dream, can cut a pattern, sew a dress, write the notation for a musical sc ore and knows how to drive a tractor.
She is also one of the few septuagenarians who can squeeze so effectively into size 8 hipster jeans, wear diamond cuffs on her ears and boast a tattoo of three roses blooming across her impressively flat, tanned stomach. She also knows how to laugh at herself.
‘After I had the tattoo done for my 70th birthday, I put a picture of it on Instagram, and someone said: “Is that Tequila?” ’ she shrieks, and clomps off to make a pot of coffee. We meet in her agent’s elegant apartment in Stockholm, where Britt is remarkably calm and collected after ‘an oaf in an Audi’ reversed into her Mini Cooper, smashing the fog lights and denting her grille.
Today, as always, she is perfectly groomed and makes several pit stops to slick more peach gloss onto her already glossy lips. Spirited and candid, she also has a very Swedish forthrightness about sex. She pours coffee, puts some cakes on the table and, straight away, we are, in a manner of speaking, on to her pelvic floor. ‘It is actually very good,’ says Britt.
She puts this down to Pilates plus 15 years of power walking and weight lifting, but despite being in such tip-top honeymoon condition, she explains why sex is off the menu.
‘Women of my age? I don’t believe that it does happen very much and I think women should be truthful about this. I have enough girlfriends around my age who are married and who do not want sex, either.
‘Joan Collins? Somehow she feels the need to be sexy at 83. I love Joan, but this is an image, an illusion. Just like her wigs, it is not reality.
‘I’m not like her. I don’t try to portray myself as sexy. If you call me “sexy Britt”, I will puke. I am going to be 74 years old, how can I be sexy?’
Britt and Joan have been friends ‘for about a hundred years’. Joan was a great chum of Britt’s first husband, Peter Sellers. And it was Joan who introduced Britt to Rod Stewart, at a party at Cher’s house in LA in 1975.
The women are agreed on most things — including an unquenchable fondness for leopard print and a belief in the redeeming powers of rose wine — but on the subject of sex, they cannot concur.
‘God had a plan about sex,’ says Britt. ‘He made men incapable and women disinterested at a certain age. But then, human interference changed that with Viagra. In America, Viagra is advertised on television, warning: “If your erection lasts more than four hours, see a doctor.” What is the point? By then the poor woman would be dead! Another cake?’
We meet primarily to talk about Britt’s face, in particular when she dented her own lovely grille.
On a recent episode of ITV’s Loose Women, Britt confessed that having cosmetic procedures when she was in her 50s was the worst thing she ever did. All she wanted was a bit of help in holding back the years and maintaining her celebrated beauty, but that is not what happened.
‘It destroyed my looks and ruined my face. It was the biggest mistake of my life. When I look at photographs of myself before I had it done, I looked very good. I can see that now, but I couldn’t see it at the time.’
Britt had just turned 52 in 1994 when she made an appointment to have her was never approved for use in the U.S. ‘The effects are permanent,’ Miss Lewis tells me. ‘Today, most doctors don’t want to use it.’
To her horror, Britt discovered that her engorged trout pout was almost impossible to reverse.
‘I looked like a pie where the crust comes up,’ she says, making crimping movements with her fingers. ‘I got criticised in the media, something that is always worse for a woman.
‘Mickey Rourke and Sly Stallone look like something out of a horror movie, but no one gives a damn about them. Instead, they were saying how bad I was, how vain I was. Why had I done it? Blah, blah, blah.
‘Nobody knew I was horrified, too. I was mortified. I wanted to die.’
For the past 20 years, Britt has undergone ‘excruciatingly painful’ corticosteroid injections in a bid to ‘melt’ the Articol. At one point, she had ‘some stuff’ put in her lip in Los Angeles, to make her pout look better, but that didn’t work out, either: ‘It was just so horrendous. I had to get another doctor to take it all out.’
She still looks lovely, even if the botched procedures have left a slight, eldritch cast over the lower half of her face. It is a mistake she doesn’t want other women to make. ‘I have friends who say: “I am going to have a bit of filler there and a bit of filler there” and I say: “Please, don’t.”
‘I’m not totally against plastic surgery. If it is done right, it can be amazing, uplifting. Sharon Stone, Christie Brinkley, Jane Fonda? All