The Russian taxi driver is the first to see her. "Look, there she is. OmiGod. I cannot believe it. Elizabeth Taylor! Today is my birthday. I will never forget this." We had left behind the Great Gatsby mansions, gleaming white against the lime-green lawns, the pseudo-gothic and baronial mishmash of architectural styles favoured by the millionaires of Bel Air, and driven up a vertiginous road, all lush undergrowth and garlands of bougainvillaea, to reach Miss Taylor's residence.

The gates open silently and almost immediately we are in a courtyard, with half a dozen cars, and an L-shaped complex of buildings which consists of a long low bungalow and a garage. My initial thought is that these are the servants' quarters and the star must be in some whopping great palace beyond our view. But no, there she is in the doorway, a tiny figure in black, that famous face with the dark eyebrows, framed by its halo of spun white hair, white pooch at her heels, smiling and walking towards us. "Hello," she breathes, "I'm Elizabeth."

As if we didn't know. This interview was the culmination of three years of letters, phone calls and faxes, during which time she had suffered numerous health set-backs, including an operation to remove a brain tumour the size of a golf ball, her hair had turned from black to white and for a while an elfin crop replaced the trademark bouffe; her long-term New York agents and management had been replaced by a firm in Los Angeles, so we had to embark on the process all over again; she had come out of a period of reclusiveness; she had won a BAFTA award for lifetime achievement; I had written an essay about her which seemed to me to be, in part, an acknowledgement that I was never going to get to meet her. And yet, here, finally, we are. Was it worth the wait? Oh, yes.

Firstly, she is still astonishingly beautiful. She fixes you with those dazzling eyes of hers and it can be quite hard to concentrate on what she is saying. She hates being called a legend or an icon - since, as she rightly says, they are labels which are usually reserved for the dead. "And I'm not dead," she pouts. "I'm very full of life."

But part of the undoubted frisson of sitting face to face with her is that there are very few actors of either sex who have become so shrouded with mystique as she has in their own lifetime. Unlike Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn, age has withered her acting career. She hasn't had a major film role in years, and because we have not grown accustomed to seeing her grow old in Technicolor, there is a sense in which we can still think of her as a screen goddess, frozen in the past.

We are constantly reminded that she is alive, if only because of her frequent brushes with death. But the woman who was Malcolm Forbes's best friend, who has worked so hard at raising funds for and the profile of Aids charities, who once said that Michael Jackson was the least-weird man she knew, who bottles her allure in a top-selling scent, is someone quite separate from her youthful screen persona. And this is the curious excitement of being with her; that you are, at once, abruptly in the present with one of this century's most celebrated women, but also, intermittently in your own past, as a child and an adolescent, watching the peachy Elizabeth Taylor, on the small TV screen with your parents, playing opposite Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Richard Burton, all of them dead. It is dreamlike, listening to her satiny voice telling stories of Bogey and Coop and Monty and Marilyn and JFK - one's mental screen flickering with Hollywood's ghosts.

She is a beguiling mixture of kittenish femininity and bar-room broad, with her salty language and a thrillingly vulgar laugh. She is flirtatious, conspiratorial, funny, down-to-earth with occasional, slightly worrying lapses into la la land - when she closes her eyes or looks up to the heavens, circles the air with her hands, and talks in a frankly batty way about some experience or another. Occasionally she freezes - when she doesn't like the line of inquiry - and one is left in no doubt that the charm is underpinned by steel.

Most striking of all is her willingness to talk openly about all sorts of subjects that one might have thought were taboo. On plastic surgery: "It is an impertinent question, but I will answer it. I have had a chin tuck." On sex: "I think it's very important... and it's such F-U-U-N!" delivered with a great gleeful whoop. On drinking: "Loved it. Loved it. And I loved drinking the boys (including epic topers Burton and O'Toole) under the table." On taking recreational drugs: "I did it for a bit... oh, I had a ball being bad!" On up-keep: "I think beauty products are a bunch of... I use hand cream on my face, and always have!" Her weight: "Everybody tells me I'm fat, but I don't care. I'm 67 years old! I have the right to do what I want to do." On the joys of the elasticated waistband: "Baby... it's here!" thwacking her trousers to demonstrate.

The modest facade of the bungalow masks an opulent interior. We walk through the hall past a huge portrait, circa 1951, of Liz - or Bessie, as she prefers to be known. Monty's name for her was Bessie-Mae which she particularly liked: "I think it's sweet and country." Actually, she says, she cannot stand Liz. When she was a little girl, her brother used to tease the living daylights out of her, chasing her around the garden, dangling lizards in her face and calling her Lizzie the Lizard. Lizzie became Liz and it was all associated with stuff way back then and, as it happens, she doesn't think it's a very pretty abbreviation anyway.

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