This is the woman who used to hang out with Salvador Dali, after all.Born in 1956 to a downtrodden mother and an abusive, alcoholic truck-driving father – Hall has since said that she spent her childhood in terror of her drunk dad coming home to throw his weight about – she left Texas at 16, the minute she was old enough to get the hell out, with just a suitcase filled with copies of nasty Frederick’s of Hollywood outfits her mother had run up. “I think some of them had fantasies that they might end up marrying me or something,” she laughs The poor, deluded fools. “I know!” More dry laughter.The show works not only because of the mix of cute twentysomething guys, a glamorous older woman and access to the smartest events London and Paris have to offer, but because, as a concept, it mirrors Hall’s own experience of transforming herself from American trailer trash into a byword for modern European sophistication. As the series progresses, Hall dumps the wannabes one by one until she’s left with a winner who will be kept in a fancy London flat and attend glamorous parties on her arm.

She has just finished filming Kept, her first reality show, which sees a dozen under-sophisticated American men brought to London and Paris to go through a variety of charm-school-type processes from dressing well to saying the right things over expensive dinners, all in the quest for Hall’s undivided attention. Now I like to treat them mean.”And there has been no shortage of eager young men to practice that meanness on recently, even if she is all talk: in the flesh Hall comes over as airy and fun-loving and very unmean indeed. “I did that,” she says, going back to the subject of being treated mean by men, and throwing in another one of those funny, dry laughs of hers, peeling back her lips to show off teeth so white you almost want to grout them “It’s over. It usually works.”
The Texas drawl may still cling on after over three decades away from her native Mesquite, a dowdy, working-class outpost of Dallas, but there’s little doubt that Hall is every inch the sophisticated European lady.

“I’m very good with orchids,” she says in that atonal voice that has become something of a trademark (along with the waist-length hair, wide American smile and never-ending six-foot-and-then-heels height) “They’re tricky They don’t like a lot of attention You have to ignore them Like men Ha, ha. Apart from being a style icon of over 30 years standing and arguably the UK’s most beloved American import, Hall is a talented gardener and has been out planting sweet peas and tending to her famous orchids. It’s one of the manifold reasons why his appeal won’t ever really diminish.. I’m finished with being treated mean,” says Jerry Hall, pulling off her gardening gloves at her £5m mansion in Richmond, just about the smartest suburb London has to offer the deserving ex-wife of the world’s greatest rocker.

As Darcy ruefully acknowledges, at 28 he thought “meanly of all the world”, and his pride is duly humbled by his passion for a good woman “What do I not owe you?” he exclaims You know, most women would quite like to hear that. He is a reminder that the right woman may bring out the emotional depths in a reserved man and can humble the pride of a rich one – though, as in all her novels, Jane Austen is blunt about the economic realities underlying relations between the sexes. Now it is Elizabeth’s turn to have her pride humbled, and when he asks her to marry him, she receives his offer “with gratitude and pleasure”.The beauty of Darcy is that he reassures women of their transformative powers. She encounters Darcy on home ground, where his real worth is made clear.The reassessment is complete when he rescues the reputation of her sister, Lydia, who had run off with the abominable Wickham.

She naturally falls for the sheer elegance and wealth of the estate – a very human reaction – but she is also taken by the testimony of his housekeeper about his goodness to the poor and to his tenants. MacFadyen, like Firth, is never more alluring than when he is soaked to the skin.But no sooner does Elizabeth send him about his business, than he disarms her with a letter that explains why he detests Wickham, as the man had tried to seduce his young sister. She finds she has been unjustly prejudiced, though she is still far from being in love.That love comes later, when she finds herself by chance in his Derbyshire home. That scene in the film takes place against the sensually potent backdrop of a temple in the estate of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in a rainstorm. The scene is set, then, for Elizabeth’s first, indignant rejection of his offer of marriage, which is made, she observes, by a man who expects to be accepted.So it is that pride gets its fall, and Darcy is sent packing, after declaring his passion for a woman whom he admits he loves against his better judgement. And when she discovers that he was the means of separating his friend Bingley from her delightful sister Jane, her resentment is unbounded. Elizabeth’s disdain for Darcy for his arrogance is compounded by her indignation at his treatment of Wickham.