Sarah Miles: Star survivor from a galaxy of giants

When you mention Sarah Miles to people, as I have over the past week, you get a remarkable array of responses. To some she will forever be Ryan's Daughter, to others she is simply Bernard Miles's daughter, or Robert Bolt's widow, or, intriguingly, Laurence Olivier's mistress. She tells me that Noël Coward once directed her in Hay Fever at the National Theatre, and burst into Olivier's office without knocking, to find her sitting on Olivier's knee. Coward never forgave her. "I didn't realise quite how in love with Larry he was," she says, dreamily.

When you mention Sarah Miles to people, as I have over the past week, you get a remarkable array of responses. To some she will forever be Ryan's Daughter, to others she is simply Bernard Miles's daughter, or Robert Bolt's widow, or, intriguingly, Laurence Olivier's mistress. She tells me that Noël Coward once directed her in Hay Fever at the National Theatre, and burst into Olivier's office without knocking, to find her sitting on Olivier's knee. Coward never forgave her. "I didn't realise quite how in love with Larry he was," she says, dreamily.

She can be very dreamy. Indeed, there are also those who think of her predominantly as a recluse keen on meditation and drinking her own urine - an old chestnut she would like to see roasted out of existence. Others remember that, once upon a time in America, she was accused, and acquitted, of murdering a man called David Whiting, who had become obsessed with her after a one-night stand (an episode which wrecked her marriage to Bolt, although they later remarried). To me, she remains, resoundingly, Alice de Trafford, the dissolute nob she played so spellbindingly in White Mischief. Whatever, she is one interesting woman.

The reason she has agreed to see me is to publicise Location, a charming BBC documentary in which she revisits the Dingle peninsula where Ryan's Daughter (written by Bolt, directed by David Lean) was filmed 30 years ago. She has offered to pick me up at Petersfield station in Hampshire, a 20-minute drive from the home she shared with Bolt - or shares, for he is buried by the croquet lawn.

She is late, and I am beginning to wonder whether I have got the right day, when into the station car park lurches a battered, borrowed Ford Sierra, and out jumps Miles, terribly apologetic and agitated. Her beloved old English mastiff, Hiawatha, Watty for short, is dying, she tells me. She has been up with him all night. Hiawatha, looking magnificently lugubrious, fills the entire back seat of the car. I share the passenger seat with Oxton, one of her two Yorkshire terriers. Oxton was Robert Bolt's middle name.

We lurch out of the car park and onto a winding country road, with Miles repeatedly turning round and wailing, in that wonderful cut-glass accent redolent of another era, "Oh darling, daaarling Watty". Meanwhile, I watch the oncoming traffic with a fixed smile and mounting terror, but eventually we arrive, thank God, and Miles spends five minutes cajoling, then literally booting Watty out of the back seat, swearing all the while. I am warming to her hugely. The house is remarkable, 11th-century, with a modern extension built sometime in the 1300s, and inhabited, Miles assures me, by at least a dozen ghosts. One of them is Bolt, or at any rate she feels his presence, especially when she works on her screenplay. She is writing a sequel to Ryan's Daughter.

"I'd like to call it The Legend of Rosy Ryan, as corny as that," she says. "It's set in the 1940s, and she is now my age. It's bowling along and it's absolutely spiffing, I'm so excited about it. I can't think why Robert never thought of doing it." Sadly, many of the principals are no longer around. "But I'm hoping to get Johnny Mills before he dies."

And to direct? Who could fill the boots of the great David Lean? "There are several people who could do it, as long as the script is watertight. I'm writing on spec which is the only way to do these things, because if you're commissioned you have 100 accountants telling you what to do, and none of them know sugar from shit when it comes to artistic integrity."

Hollywood, in fact humanity in general, is a pale shadow of its former self, Miles believes. "Far and Away, with Cruise and Kidman, was absolutely useless. It was made where we shot Ryan's Daughter, and had the same scope but no script. The script is the last thing they think about today."

I ask whether she believes that all the truly great actors are dead? "When you say that there is nobody around like the old ones, you can get trapped in your own bullshit. But it has been said since time began that we are lesser than our parents, and the awful truth is that we are. Everything is less. Nobody takes risks. And our homes are little boxes. We live in boxes watching boxes." Hers, I venture, is a heck of a box. "Well, I'll have you know that it is the smallest manor in England. But the point is that you can't help but shrink in this shrinking world. I feel very strongly that materialism will be the death of mankind. But I'm really not a doom-monger, you know. It's just that you've got me on a bad day, because my dog is dying. Darling Watty. Oh daaarling."

Under an adjacent table Watty shifts position, executing a slow three-point turn in the manner of a great ocean liner changing course. It seems fitting that Miles - petite and, although pushing towards 60, still an unconventional beauty - should have such an enormous dog. Perhaps it is to ward off the feeling that this is a shrinking world. Certainly she has shared her life with enormous characters, such as Bolt, Olivier and another lover, her co-star in Ryan's Daughter, Robert Mitchum.

"I loved Mitchum very much. I don't say that he was a great actor, that I won't say. Olivier was, of course. I learnt such daring from him. Nobody goes out on a limb any more, like Larry did, and dear Ralphie [Sir Ralph Richardson]. But Mitchum was a great man. Not at all what he seemed. He saw things from a different angle. I've met them all, you know, and there was nobody to touch him."

Miles speaks almost as highly of Steven Spielberg, by whom she had an abortion, if that is the correct expression, back in the 1970s when she lived in California. She is horrified when I say that he is maligned by some for being overly concerned with commercialism.

"When I lived with him, around the time he made Duel, he was a simple, caring, passionate artist. I'd be amazed if he has become something else. In those days they had just got remote-control televisions in America, and he knew so much about scripts that he would find out what films were on, then cut from one channel to another to create a whole different film, because in each of them he knew exactly what was about to happen."

She shakes her head at the wonder of it. Genius, it seems, has been the great aphrodisiac in her life. "Yes, but genius is such a devalued word. 'He's a genius, have you seen the way he lays the floor?' I have known a few, I suppose. I met Orson Welles. He was arrogant, greedy, impossible, but he was allowed to be impossible, because he was treasuring a very precious jewel, his genius. And when I lived in Chelsea in the 1960s I befriended an old man and had a very sexy tea with him. I didn't realise it was Bertrand Russell at first. I got to know him very well. He was a bastard, too, but lovely."

By now we have moved on to a Thai restaurant in a neighbouring village, for a lunch rendered unforgettable by Miles filling the joint with her haunting song from White Mischief, "A is for Alice", sung to the tune of "Oh dear, what can the matter be?" She has been enormous fun, but emotionally she is fragile, and rather alarmingly she starts to weep when I ask how she squares her ill-fated, extra-marital liaison with her quest, on which she reflects daily, to be a good person. The only other dodgy moment is when I bring up the pee word. It turns out she hasn't drunk it for years, not that she's ashamed of doing so. "It's an ancient, ancient wisdom, an extraordinary way of remaining young. But I can tell the character of journalists by whether or not they mention it. Those that do are second-raters." Yikes. She can be tough, too.

'Locations' is on BBC2 at 1.30pm on New Year's Eve