What I said to her was that getting old is a good thing, a natural thing, and we should respect it I really don’t care if she gets a wrinkle. I’m not that type of guy.”Griffith is in fact only two years older than Banderas. But while he may talk of losing his hair and gaining a paunch, the prospect seems so far off for the 43-year-old actor that one can’t help thinking that it is very easy for him to say. Perhaps sensing that, he adds: “I’m getting embarrassed now because it sounds like the model syndrome. You know, you meet a model and you say ‘you’re beautiful’ and they say, ‘yes, but I’m studying biology and I am a very interesting person inside too you know’.”Whatever the rumours about occasional bumps in their marriage, he speaks with great warmth of his wife, whom he first saw in the flesh at the Academy Awards in 1989.

“I turned to Pedro Almodovar and said ‘wow, that girl is awesome’.” She didn’t notice him, though “No, not at all. I was nobody – I was not to be seen.” When they first met he was so tongue-tied that he opened the conversation by asking her age That’s hardly polite, I say Why on earth did he do that? “I was nervous,” he says. “She was very pretty and it was uncontrollable – stupid.” What was her reply? “She said ‘oh, great question’.” But she managed to forgive him? “She did, obviously,” he smiles, reminiscing about the time she turned up on the set of Two Much. “I remember looking at her through the curtains of my trailer and going ‘oh yes, she’s got good legs!’”There is the prospect of a reunion with Almodovar, who is planning a film adaptation of the French novel Tarantula, a story in which a plastic surgeon kidnaps a man who raped his daughter, forcibly gives him a sex change, and then falls in love with him (by now her) It sounds very bizarre, I say “It is. But, man, we are in bizarre hands, too! If someone else explained the same story to me I’d say that they were crazy. But in Pedro Almodovar I trust.” After the next Zorro film Banderas will return to Broadway in another musical (he made his debut in Nine last year), Death Takes a Holiday; and he has bought the film rights to El Camino de los Ingleses, “a story about some friends growing up in Malaga at the same time that the country was growing from dictatorship to democracy. It’s pretty much my own experience of the time.”One senses that such projects are much closer to Banderas’s heart than Hollywood blockbusters.

This is a man who, to play the part of a Cuban trumpeter convincingly in The Mambo Kings, learnt the exact hand position on the trumpet valves for every note his character performed on screen. He may have earnt himself a star on the LA sidewalk, but it is the detail of the theatre in Malaga that animates him most in conversation. “I think mine is a good perspective on life,” he says.I’d tend to agree.. Cut-price theatre tickets for the new season of opera and ballet at the Royal Opera House are to be allotted by computer after criticisms that the previous proposal favoured Londoners and people with time to queue.

Tickets for popular productions at the Royal Opera House can cost up to £175.After people register online or by post for either a single ticket or a pair, a computerised draw will take place, three weeks before the performances by stars such as Placido Domingo and Angela Gheorghiu, and the successful applicants informed.The scheme, which replaces earlier plans to distribute tickets to people who queued on the day of the performance, will give people living outside the capital time to make travel and accommodation plans, Tony Hall, the Royal Opera House chief executive, said yesterday.. Lorna Luft has laboured under the double whammy of being known as “Judy Garland’s other daughter”. Until a few years ago, Luft, who has made a career as a mid-level singer (nightclubs, touring companies and replacement casts), wouldn’t go near her mother’s catalogue. But from 1998 she has strengthened the identification with a bestselling memoir (Me and My Shadows), a mini-series based on it, and a show, Songs My Mother Taught Me, that has toured America and will open tomorrow at her former home, the Savoy. All three make clear that being Garland’s daughter and Liza Minnelli’s half-sister was no musical comedy. But the idea that her mother loved her seems to be necessary to Luft’s confidence in her ability to inspire affection in others. Flipping into chat-show mode, she tells of being in a restaurant when Julian Lennon walked by, and they could both hear diners saying, “Doesn’t he look like his father!” Scrunching her mouth into an expression of wry woe, she quotes her remark to him: “It never gets better – it just gets different.” Then, “we started to laugh,” – she demonstrates – “and he said, ‘I like you!’ and I said, ‘I like you!’” Luft squeezes her body with her upper arms to mime mutual hugs.It’s hard not to see this cuddly indignation in a concert Luft gave called “Not Even Nominated”, made up of great movie songs that never reached the shortlist for an Oscar.