In the salubrious dining room of a salubrious hotel in Kensington, Christopher "Christophe" Lambert is knocking back the rosé with a vengence, looking like a seated advertisement for Planet Hollywood, his intense and intensely famous pair of peepers hidden behind dark, corrective glasses. The Lambert stare - as much a part of the Gallic heartthrob's persona as his designer stubble and his method of speeking Ingleesh - is actually the result of myopia. He's allergic to contact lenses and, vain sod that he is won't wear glasses when making movies.

Sex symbol by definition, however, should be the epitome of style and cool. They shouldn't have tacky pink fluffy teddy bears attached to their belts like Lambert has.

The pink teddy bear is my second wife," insists Lambert (pronounced Lom-bear). "She doesn't have a name yet. I love this little teddy bear. It's not really a key-ring. Well, maybe it's meant to be, but I take good care of her."

Right! Lambert was born in New York of an Anglo French father a Franco-Belgian mother and raised in Geneva. He was chucked out of several Swiss schools and was carted off to a shrink at eight.

You only go to a psychiatrist at eight because your parents think you have problems," he muses between great lungfuls of Marlboro. "I probably had problems. I was very quiet, very introverted. The psychiatrist woke me up. She said, "You can do whatever you want.' And I just blew up. I did about three schools when I was about five to 12, and then six between 12 and 18. Psychiatrists work for some people and not for others. For me it was great. But I wasn't naughty, I was just having fun," he grins. "When I'm facing a teacher who doesn't give a shit about what he's doing, what do I care?"

Lambert was 12 when the acting bug grabbed him by the short and curlies.

"I did a play and loved the applause at the end," he recalls, repositioning a baseball cap atop the trademark mane. "No tortured reasoning, just because I liked the applause and I could express myself in a different way. There is a side of me that wants to escape myself, be in a different world. Acting is a pretty good job."

Not according to his father, though, who insisted his son put on suit and get some proper employment - at a Barclays Bank in London to be precise. He lasted four months before chucking it in and moving to Paris to become an actor. There he sold clothes on the Left Bank before joining the famed Paris Conservatiore from where he was expelled during his third year for truancy. Hanging around Paris, he appeared in a couple of forgotten French fliks before being plucked from obscurity to don the loincloth of Tarzan in 1984's Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan Lord Of The Apes. The Highlander films, Subway, Knight Moves and this month's Fortress followed.

Now living in L.A. and married to actress Diane Lane, Lambert had, at one time, a reputation for romancing his leading ladies. He acknowledges the truth in the rumour but insists he's now faithful. Does he still see himself as a something of a ladies' man?

"What?" he asks. "I'm meant to look in the mirror and go, 'Hey, how you doing, Sexy Boy?'"

Well, aren't you embarrassed by being a "sex symbol"?

"No. You never go against how people see you," he insists (though "heart-slob" would seem to be a more accurate description given his rather dishevelled deportment here today). "If they see that, great! It's not negative."

Such is Lambert's appeal that during one interview he had to sprint out of the back door of the hotel with the journalist in tow because a female fan was hot on his heels.

Should your Empire reporter have brought his trainers with him today?

"I have that from time to time," he grins, "but there is something thrilling about that. It's like going to a concert and being backstage. The day you don't have an audience, then you cry. So while you have one, you might as well as enjoy it. One woman followed me all over the world for two years. She was always at the same hotel, at the bar, at the reception. One day I was in Rome and she said, 'Hi' and I said, 'Hi.' But then she was in Brazil, then New York...

"Then I had a kind of Fatal Attraction in Italy with a woman who came to my room for an autograph. She sat in a chair and said, 'I'm not moving.' I was with a bodyguard and he gently asked her to leave. But I came back from dinner at midnight and went to be and she called me and said, 'I'm coming up.' She practically destroyed the door. So I called my guy again and she left. Then it's two o'clock and she calls again and says, 'I've killed myself, I've opened my veins and I'm bleeding to death and it's going to be your fault.' So I called my guy and said, 'You go to her room.'"

He shakes his head.

"She had put lipstick on her wrists. It was a nightmare..."

Mark Salisbury