Elizabeth Hurley interview

Elizabeth Hurley just wants to be alone. In a moving GQ interview this week, its poignancy amplified by the fact it was conducted in her knickers with that Robin Day de nos jours, David Furnish, the enigmatic actress outlined her distaste for the flashbulbs that dog her work.

Bringing some perspective to newspapers obsessed with Middle East tittle-tattle, she announced plans to buy a country property where she can seclude herself when the business of being mysterious, beautiful and tragic becomes too much.

"I hope," she declared with the spirit that saw her through the dark days following the critically misunderstood Bedazzled, "the local farmers attack the paparazzi with their pitchforks".

The precise explanation for Liz's apprehension of rural England as an arcadian idyll where scythe-wielding locals devote their days to defending her honour is hard to pinpoint, although a biographer might cite her pivotal role as a country squire's wife in swashbuckling drama Sharpe (she removed her top; Sean Bean growled "My compliments, ma'am"; Hollywood held its breath). But there's little doubt that, in terms of things most likely to incense the agricultural community, people trying to snap Liz will be this year's foot and mouth.

Given the unqualified success with which she persuaded us that she was Texan in Serving Sara, though, it's no surprise to find Ms Hurley using the interview to distill that mysterious indifference to fame of her most famously reclusive Hollywood predecessor, Greta Garbo. Watching Liz lift her skirt up for David and discuss how much she would like to have sex with him, Elton John and the Beckhams, one's struck by a profound sense that they do make them like they used to.

Decades apart, and yet the career patterns of these two actresses are uncannily similar. By the age of 30, Garbo had dazzled in Anna Karenina: 60 years later, Hurley would unveil Passenger 57.

Yet the Swedish sphinx is merely the latest addition to a pantheon of role models actively adopted. Jackie O, Bardot, Diana: all have been slipped on to communicate various messages to Elizabeth's public. Truly, this choice of cultural references sells her short. Her Jackie O (vast sunglasses, poloneck and capri pants, decision to smile mournfully at press) is a case in point. Who can forget the stoicism with which Liz bore Hugh Grant's dalliance with a Hollywood hooker? Try as one might to invest Jacqueline Kennedy's marriage to and burial of the 35th US president with the same quiet dignity, it comes a poor second to the mysterious tip-off to photographers, following the Sunset Boulevard incident, that Liz was having a second mattress urgently delivered to the couple's home. And say what you will about Jackie's love rival Marilyn Monroe: she was no Divine Brown (as Liz once noted: "If I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe, I'd kill myself.").

Another stalwart, the Bardot (tousled hair, different glasses, decision to act coquettishly with press) does her similarly little credit. Bardot limped into the popular imagination with And God Created Woman. The 90s' version was swifter, subtler and altogether more streamlined - in fact it sidestepped having to make a film at all.

Versace, safety pins, a watercress soup diet: working with Roger Vadim or Godard suddenly seemed frightfully yesteryear.

So who will be the next icon invoked by our heroine? Will Elizabeth ever achieve that lack of recognition she craves? These are questions not even David Furnish attempts to answer.

To anyone who somehow sees Liz's posturing as the human equivalent of those inexplicable remakes Hollywood occasionally orders (Casablanca a few years back was particularly inspired), I say: have you not seen Dangerous Ground? That, stargazers, is progress. Greta, Jackie O, Bardot, Diana. In every important way, they're just poor men's Liz Hurleys.