DAME EILEEN ATKINS, 70, claims that Colin Farrell, 42 years her junior, spent two-and-a-half hours trying to seduce her. And she turned him down.
I am not sure what I find more staggering about this admission. The fact that Farrell, one of the sexiest men in the world, tried to charm the knickers off one of our most formidable actresses. Or the fact that she said No.
No? Excuse me, I need industrial-strength smelling salts. Farrell is an überstud. He has been linked to Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Naomi Campbell. He is said to be in the running to be James Bond. He has the sort of body that can swing from the chandelier without breaking sweat. He spent a couple of hours making with the Irish blarney? That alone would turn most women into putty in his hands.
Atkins, one of the creators of the classic television series Upstairs Downstairs, described this exquisitely revealing slice of thespian life on the ITV chat show Loose Women. Asked about her sex life she said (coyly, not giving him away; the culprit’s name was confirmed later by her agent): “I was doing a movie and three weeks before my 70th birthday, a simply stunningly gorgeous big film star aged 28 years old, came into my hotel room for sex without strings.”
Let us pause this tantalising tale of unrequited lust there. Without strings? She did not have to mask her embarrassment in the morning? He wasn’t going to hang about like a lovesick schoolboy? He didn’t want his underpants ironed? His feet under the table? A night of physical passion was all he wanted to get and to give? And she turned him down? Let’s have a large electric fan in here.
This sort of seduction does not happen in real life. Farrell is top totty. In the real world young men who want to bed their Mrs Robinsons are virgins. They fondly think that if they go to bed with an older woman — and to them 35 is older — they will be taught the Kama Sutra in one session which they can then try out as soon as they find fresher fish to fry.
What happens in real life to older women is that the men they meet have been damaged by an acrimonious divorce and what they really want is mothering — with a bit of the other thrown in. Or they belong to the army of under-endowed rejects who need someone they can trust to teach them how to enjoy lovemaking anyway. These men fondly believe an older woman will not sneer at them next day, and mostly they are right because such a young lover must be someone’s son. Or, in this case, grandson. And women, when they are not distracted by handling lovers with large egos, tend to be softhearted.
It is instructive to hear middle-aged men’s reaction to this saga. They think it is not on for such a young blood to lust after such old flesh. Although it is perfectly natural for dirty old men to swan around with near-adolescent arm candy. That’s different? They need to drag themselves into the 21st century.
There has been a seismic change in young men’s attitude to much older women. These young bucks have been reared by feminists. Their granny probably goes canoeing down the Amazon. They don’t dwell on the body so much as they are turned on by the brain. Farrell probably finds Atkins’s mind and soul sexy. She is clever and creative — so why should he give a flying whatsit for a few wrinkles?
The same pork-bellied middle-aged men would faint dead away if Michael Winner were to turn down the advances of, say, Billie Piper — and my apologies to that pretty actress for even suggesting such a coupling. Most men would assume Winner had taken leave of his senses.
Atkins says she spent more than two hours saying No. “But it was pure bliss and it made me sail through my 70th birthday without a care in the world.” She might have felt like Ellen MacArthur if she had said Yes.
For most women, Farrell’s was an offer they could not refuse. But Atkins did not turn her back on the prospect of a roll in the film company’s hotel bed — they were making a film, Ask The Dust, due for release later this year — for a one-night stand on moral grounds. Or because she believes in the seventh commandment which stipulates, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. She is, after all, married; her second husband is the film producer Bill Shepherd and, according to her agent, “as far as I know they are happily married”.
Asked whether she was tempted, Atkins said: “Of course I was!” But instead of opening a bottle of champagne and swinging with the Devil, she told how she followed the advice of another respected British actress and, in her time, femme fatale, Sîan Phillips. Ms Phillips, according to Atkins, tells over-excited Lotharios who want to get intimate, “this is deeply inappropriate”.
As foreplay, that remark sounds like the verbal equivalent of a cold shower though it obviously had no effect on Farrell. Maybe he was too hot to cool down. I have to say, there are questions which this chat show failed to answer. Such as, did he knock on her door and ask if he could borrow some toothpaste? Why did she let him in? Why not put him out of his misery by saying “I am married”, a much more persuasive turn-off, I’d have thought, than the “deeply inappropriate”, a quaint line which sounds more like one of her own scripts from Upstairs Downstairs.
It took an inordinately long time for Atkins to say “no”. Most decent men, even if their libido has gone into overdrive, get the message quicker than two-and-a-half hours. Methinks the Dame doth protest too much.
Maybe she toyed with the boy just a little? Said the sort of “No” that men mistake for “Maybe”? And who would blame her? The sort of scenario she describes fuels the fantasies of thousands of lovelorn older women.
One of the chat-up lines Farrell apparently used was: “The reason you won’t do it is because your body isn’t as good as it was when you were young, isn’t it? That’s why you’re saying No. I don’t care about that. I don’t care.” He sounds like the perfect gentleman to me, even if he was on the make.
Atkins’s reponse to this chivalrous speech was: “But I’m too proud of how I looked when I was younger. My body is still the same weight, but it’s all distributed in a different way!” What intrigues me about this reaction is that it is so actressy. So vain. Or is it that skinny women age exceptionally badly? Do they look like scraggy, plucked chickens when they are naked? Could it be that those Rubenesque females who have been fighting the flab for 50 years will at last reap the harvest?
I am nowhere near 70 but not that far off either and I have yet to be worried about showing off my naked body. Certainly not enough to pass on a romp with Alexander the Great. The movie may have been a flop but I bet Colin Farrell isn’t.
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