Mr Barney takes a deep pause to meditate and Miss Andress exquisitely chooses this

Mr Barney takes a deep pause to meditate, and Miss Andress exquisitely chooses this moment to send her glass of orange juice cascading across the table, to cries of "Merde, merde, merde!", and to scamper - yes, certainly scamper - from the room in search of assistance. Mr Barney buries his answer deep in imagery but I extract from it the crystal line: "She was probably the first athletic sex symbol".Indeed, the legendary sequence that both introduced her to a global public and sealed her immortality is the one wherein she emerges from the sea (I swear I first mistyped "sea" as "sex") to encounter Connery's James Bond on a Jamaican isle in Dr No. And that sequence - like all proverbial movie moments, shorter and simpler than hindsight has made it - has its particular appeal because not only is Andress merely eye-wideningly beautiful and dressed to drive you mad, but, with her fearsome knife and determined stroll, she is clearly perfectly able to look after herself, a new and very Sixties image of a sex goddess.The icon herself was perplexed by the shooting of the emerging-from-the- sea sequence. "I thought they were going to have a transparent wave open on me," she says. "I thought they did it in such a way that I didn't see it when I was in Jamaica [she means, while on location].

I thought they probably took a wave, and I will come out of it later You know they can do these things photographically. So I was waiting for this incredible appearance, for something strange. But here I am standing, waiting, thinking 'Night is going to come', but that wasn't what it was. It was just that I had a very athletic-looking body."I consider myself a classical-looking person. The body is athletic, strong-looking, without doing anything. It's not somebody who went body- building or does gymnastics I do sports, I swim, I ski, but that's all. I was just lucky".She looks as fit and sleek as ever and you figure she must have a rigorous health regime "Oh no! I would hate all that.

After I came along, all those fitness centres sprang up and all the women were into exercise I never exercised, ever I was just born this way I was very Germanic My father has broad shoulders and always sits very straight Not like today. My son sits like that and studies like that" - she pantomimes a punctured beanbag - "and I say, 'Sit up straight!' We were never allowed to slope over the table In school also, otherwise we got hit. So I was used to holding myself correctly".The vogue for the strong-looking woman was pretty brief in Hollywood, as such vogues usually are. Andress had five years of movies everyone has at least heard of, then on to the pan-European co-productions that leave few traces.But the five years made their impact. The night before we met I was talking to the actress Jane Horrocks and I mentioned my date next day Horrocks got deliciously excited.