It was a strange atmosphere, because no one seemed to know why they were invited - Peter Mandelson actually asked me (moi!) 'Who are all these people?' but I couldn't tell him. This was at a party given by Sally Greene in her Cheyne Walk home, where the guests included not only fabulous me, but also Jerry Hall, Peter Mandelson, Chris Smith, Salman Rushdie, Fiona Shaw, plus an awful lot of middle-aged men in suits. Plus, he kept running away and giggling with Ralph Fiennes. His thick wavy hair was dyed purply-black (he explained he is currently playing a Mexican in a film), but his skimpy moustache was a Robin Cook ginger. Second, he was wearing a dull grey suit and what looked like a polyester eau de nil shirt. First - like so many film actors - he is shorter than you expect, about five six or seven. But I have to say that meeting him in the flesh in London, I was terribly disappointed. And he moves well, like a dancer, with a natural grace and rippling pantherish muscles. He can do a sudden teeth-baring grin like Jack Nicholson's, which can be either terrifying or seductive. He has a very striking face - big mouth, big teeth, big eyes, triangular flat 'medieval' cheeks. He can afford to pick his films because the rest of the time he is fully engaged as a stage actor at the Wooster Group in New York, a company he co-founded with his partner, Elizabeth LeCompte, 24 years ago. In fact, his filmography is altogether impressive, largely because he chooses to work with interesting directors. He is always good at scene-stealing weirdos, but he was also good as Christ in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and as TS Eliot in Tom & Viv. We know Dafoe is King Dong - what else has he got going for him? Well, obviously he is a good actor - two Oscar nominations (for Platoon and last year's Shadow of the Vampire), plus an unforgettable cameo as the worm-swallowing paraplegic in Born on the Fourth of July, another as the morphine-shooting spy in The English Patient, and yet another as the motel creeper in David Lynch's Wild at Heart. When he appeared naked in a play in New York, a reviewer noted that, 'As one, the women in the audience let out a gasp of delighted astonishment.' Then Madonna chose him as her leading man for Body of Evidence and I'm sure she wouldn't want to waste her time dropping candlewax on just an average-sized willy.Įnough already. Anyway, there is plenty of independent evidence of its grandeur.

Also, I thought he was waiting for me to ask so that he could deliver some prepared putdown, and I wanted to deny him that moment of triumph. It wasn't a failure of nerve exactly, more a failure of will. Sorry - I didn't ask Willem Dafoe about the size of his dong.

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