‘Warren Beatty was the most divine lover of all’

beyond unbelievable. But they are women with millions and millions in the bank.

‘The average woman with a normal income is not going to get what they get. It just will not happen.’

So how does she feel about that doctor now?

‘If I could hurt him, I would. He hurt me. There was a time when I couldn’t even move my lips.’

Britt grew up here in Stockholm, where her father ran a department store and made sure that his little Britt-Marie did a secretarial course, so that she would have something to fall back on if acting failed.

She has been in more than 200 films, including Get Carter, The Wicker Man, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and the Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun in which she played Mary Goodnight opposite Roger Moore.

She has always worked very hard, but even Britt would admit that she is better known for her love life than for her acting.

In 1964, she married Peter Sellers after a whirlwind romance, and the following year they had a daughter, Victoria. The marriage was ravaged by his mental instability, and they divorced in 1968.

‘Today, he would be called bipolar,’ says Britt.

In 1973, she had a son, Nicolai, with record producer Lou Adler, and Nic and his wife have given Britt her much adored only grandchild, Cash who is now four.

A decade after Nic’s birth, she married Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom, who was 18 years her junior, but they divorced in 1992.

‘I left him on my 50th birthday, just like my mother left my father on her 50th birthday,’ she says. ‘It was very sad, I love Jim, and we are wonderful friends, but I couldn’t stay with him, it wasn’t fair.

‘If you can’t fulfil all of your wifely duties, it is not a real marriage. I’m not just talking about sex, I mean intimacy of any kind. I really wanted to be alone.’

The couple had a son TJ, who is now 28. On his left breast, he has a tattoo of his mother wearing a folk hat and Swedish national costume when she was five years old, a likeness taken from an old photograph. ‘His poor girlfriends. They cannot escape me, even in bed,’ chortles Britt.

She also had a celebrated romance with actor George Hamilton (‘a lovely man, a great laugh’), the Queen’s cousin and photographer, Lord Lichfield (they partied with Princess