FIRST it's the lights. Angi Dickinson flicks one was switch and then another, looking critically at the effect she's making on the hotel room she has just entered. "I'm such a lighting fiend," she explains.
There, dressed in denim jeans, blouse over a brown polo neck and white leather, lace up ankle boots, she strides over to the curtains. Pulling the heavy drapes back further she finds a glass door behind them, just waiting to be opened a little. "Isn't that better?"
"Are you hot?" she next inquires, bending down to the knob on the side of the radiator. But no, that's off. No adjustment possible there. So, with the elements of the room more or less to her liking, it's time to settle on the sofa for the first interview of the morning.
"Oh my goodness, you have me on tape running around, changing the room," she exclaims, as she spies the tape recorder on the table. However she quickly admits that she's liable to do the same in any house she's visiting "I just don't like closed curtains.
For a woman who entered the movie business on the strength of her looks 42 years ago, you might think the curtain would have long closed on her career. But the 65 year old actress, who reached the peak of her time in the leading role of the 1970s TV series Police Woman, is in Dublin to publicise one of three films she shot last year, the Irish made The Sun. The Moon And The Stars.
"I am a survivor but I had a small war," she says, reflecting on the toll the industry took on many of the Hollywood stars she has played opposite Dean Martin, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and Peter Sellers. To be on top is very tough and I've never been on top in that way.
She singles out Frank Sinatra as one who has coped. "You see Elvis not making it and Marilyn Monroe not making it and Michael Jackson having to live in a glass jar to make it and he's only 35 or something. Frank Sinatra is 80, years old and he survived, being the biggest of them all."
It is in fact Frank Sinatra who she credits with being responsible for igniting her interest in the business. Working as a secretary at a Californian plant manufacturing airplane seats, she had just won her second beauty contest. She caught the eye of one of the judges who was a casting director on a TV variety show and he called her up.
"He said. `Do you want to be on the show one day? I said. `But I can't act.' He exasperatedly said. `Can you walk?' I said. `Yes'. He told me what the hours were, what the days were and what it paid, and I said. `I'll be there'." Her boss let her off work, and that was the beginning of her career.
"When I walked into the rehearsal hall, Frank Sinatra was singing and I was gone. I had no doubts what I wanted to do. If he had not been there and it was just an ordinary day on a set, I might have felt I didn't belong. But he made the difference."
That first encounter was to develop into an affair which she readily confirms. In a British newspaper article a few years ago, she said. "Yes I did love him and I still do. The affair never went far enough but I can imagine that I could have had a good life with him."
In the manner of many great Hollywood starts she learned as she went along, taking supporting roles in a succession of movies before landing the career shaping role of Feathers in Rio Bravo. Critics are unanimous in the view that Howard Hawks's 1959 classic, in which she played opposite John Wayne, was the high point of her career.
"They're probably right," she agrees. That, and Point Blank and Dressed to Kill are my best."
Did she enjoy working with director John Boorman on Point Blank (1967)? "Oh yes, it was his first important film you know and hue was great. He once said to, me. `Cut the crap'," she recalls with a Basil Brush peal of laughter. "I wasn't sure what he meant, analysing it, but I did it without knowing what I was doing. I was more cent red and I really was good. It's a remarkable movie and Lee Marvin was wonderful."
Just a year after Rio Bravo, Dickinson worked with Sinatra on Oceans Eleven and was a "hanger on with his celebrated brat pack. "We were all there in Las Vegas. Shirley Maclaine was the only woman who was around a lot. It was historical from the standpoint of Vegas shows Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr and Joey Bishop did one or two shows every night after shooting in the daytime. They were the funniest. I went nine times. I hung around but wasn't a true member. I think Frank was seeing Juliet Prowse at the time, so if you weren't one of their girls it was a little touchly being a single girl in that group.
Out of the impressive roll call of leading men she's played opposite, Dickinson says it's impossible to pick a favourite. "One that was most entertaining on set was Richard Burton because it The Bramble Bush, wasn't a very good, movie and it wasn't difficult. So in between set ups it was talk time. He was so amazing, entertaining and funny."
She regrets that she didn't get the chance to carry a film the way younger actresses such as Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer do today. "I think always the men were bigger stars and more important in the story. I did one movie, The Sins of Rachel Caye now that was one exception. It was my story for sure" she says of the 1961, Gordon Douglas film in which she played a missionary nurse vacillating between the affections of Peter Finch and Roger Moore.
"Some people might say that even with all those stars she's still not a star. I realise the critics say that but that's fine with me. The era I grew up in movies did not have many leading stories about a woman.
Her early childhood as one of three sisters was spent in North Dakota, "playing in the mud with pots and pans and skating in the winter". Her parents published the town's weekly newspaper. When she was 10, they all moved to California "like hundreds of others in the war to get jobs".
Even as a teenager devouring the "fan" magazines, she was sceptical of the false glamour of show business. "I thought it was too much to be true.
It was with such scepticism that she later greeted news of one of her own publicity stunts. In 1963 Universal announced in Chicago that it had insured her legs for $1 million. She immediately rang the studios "I said, are you sure they're really insured? They said oh yes, but don't ask us for how long I never found out. I never wanted to know!"
The intrusion of unwanted publicity was toughest for her in the mid 1970s when her second marriage, of "11 and four years" to composer Burt Bacharach, was breaking up "11 before he split and four years before we really ended it".
"Police Woman was at its peak and therefore they were very interested. They would print things that were not true and I had a husband who assumed they were. Then I was stubborn not to defend myself, like give me a little respect kind of thing."
Of Bacharach now, she says. "It's just as if we never knew each other and that's sad but that's the way it is." They have one daughter, Nikki (30), who is a "hard drummer" and studying geology in college.
Dickinson's "special friendship" with the late John F. Kennedy has been widely written about in the media. But she resolutely refuses to confirm or deny the rumours that she had a horrid affair with the late US president.
Now, once described as every 40 year old man's fantasy, she lives happily alone in Beverly Hills with her two "kitties". The notion of another live in relationship is dismissed with Where would I put his clothes?"
For an actress who personified Howard Hawks's ideal of a woman who looked young but seemed older the inevitable, very public ageing must be hard to bear. "It's not always easy," she agrees. I guess it's to do with expectation and I think that's the key in all of life. If you have great expectation, you can he so disappointed. So I expect people to see that I have aged.
"Police Woman saved me, I think, because on television people get to know you, not just how you look but what you are." She found the work "gruelling" and refused to return to series television three years later when she was offered the role of Krystle Carrington in the long running soap opera Dynasty.
"I also put pictures of Elizabeth Taylor on my refrigerator because it reminds me that everybody ages band it's not just I who have changed and have gotten a wider face, it's all women. She's still a great star and huge personality and she doesn't look like she did in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and so that gives me comfort," she chuckles.
IT is a mature woman with an adventurous spirit that she plays in The Sun, The Moon And The Stars, which also stars Jason Donovan and is written and directed by Geraldine Creed. Why did she take the part?
"It always comes down to the script, no matter what picture I do. There's one picture I took without reading the script. I was in London, in love and I got a call at the recording studio where my to be husband was recording. My agent said. Do you want to play Marlon Brando's wife? Jane Fonda's in the movie [The Close. 1966] Robert Redford has a small part'. `Well', I said, `what's the part?' `Not too big.' `Well what's the pay?' `Not too much' and I said. `Okay I'll take it'.
It's a genuine, bubbling enthusiasm for the film business that keeps her going. It feels good to work. And I never made the kind of money that I can say I don't need it.
"I just love movies," she says.
I love being in them I love being at them and I think they re magical when they're good. The Sun. The Moon And The Stars is a magical little show but also so real. I love it where there's realism and entertainment, when you're caught up in it. You don't want it just real, she adds. You can get that at home!"
