Maria Schneider has done it all - including drugs, debauchery, even a stint in a mental asylum - since starring opposite Marlon Brando in 'Last Tango in Paris'. But the only thing she now regrets, she tells Marianne Macdonald, is making that film…

It's startling to go from watching Maria Schneider naked, sizzlingly nubile and fizzing with life, on my television screen in Last Tango In Paris, to meeting her in that city the next day.

At 54 she has the same baby face and sparkling black eyes, the same rosy, pillowy lips and mass of shiny brown curls, but this Maria Schneider has wrinkles and the skin of a chain-smoker. Her masculine white shirt is buttoned up to her neck in the stylish bar in the Hôtel du Louvre where we are sitting and its long sleeves cover her wrists. I can't help wondering if it's to conceal the scars from her years as a junkie.

Schneider was 19 when she made Last Tango in 1972. She trumped it three years later with another iconic masterpiece - Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger.

It starred Jack Nicholson as a disillusioned television reporter who swaps identities with a corpse he finds in his Central African hotel. But, though everyone has heard of Last Tango in Paris, few have even seen The Passenger. Nicholson has owned all the rights since 1986 and, rumour has it, blocked the film's circulation because he wanted to own it as an art collector owns a painting. It is considered a 'lost classic'.

Now, finally, Nicholson has allowed the film to be reissued and it will be shown at the National Film Theatre later this month before touring the country and being released on DVD.

In an interview on the DVD Nicholson recalls how, in one scene, he had to hold Schneider upright because she was so zonked on painkillers. But, despite that, and despite her years on heroin and cocaine, what you notice about her in person is that she still has a faint glow: a warmth, a sense of humour, the calm acceptance of someone who has been there and done it all.

And she has - simulated anal intercourse with Brando, shared a house with Brigitte Bardot, committed herself to a Rome mental asylum, slept with women, slept with men (though she dissolves in hoarse giggles at the idea she might have slept with Nicholson) and come out of it all to find true love.

But she would not make Last Tango in Paris if she had her time again. 'No,' she says in her French accent, shaking another cigarette from the packet. 'I would have said no. I would have done my work more gradually, more discreetly. I would have been an actress, I think, but more quietly.'

The director Bernardo Bertolucci offered her the part after seeing her picture in a modelling book; even then she was living life at full tilt. She had been raised by her mother, Marie, near the German border in France and had left home after an argument with her at 16.

Last night I popped over to the Oxygen offices to check out the first episode of the lady-centric net's first reality competition show, Pretty Wicked, and pop a few questions to the show's host, Top Model winner CariDee English.

Now, granted, there's nothing explicitly gay about Wicked, which plops a ten-pack of shallow beauties into a loft (the same loft that housed the spandexed hopefuls of Who Wants to Be a Superhero, if I'm not mistaken) and tells them that they're going to have to win a beauty contest that has nothing to do with their looks. But as a fan of guilty pleasures like True Beauty and America's Most Smartest Model, I wanted to check it out ... and as a rabid backer of CariDee in Cycle 7, I wanted to see what my girl was up to.

First off, it's probably no surprise that CariDee is a big friend of the gays. When I mentioned where I worked, she gasped, "Oh! The loves of my life!" and told me that pretty much all of her friends and many of her colleagues are gay guys. In fact, just this week she shot the campaign for Project Runway winner Christian Siriano's fall line, with Siriano's photographer boyfriend Brad Walsh behind the lens. "He's such a good friend of mine ... he's my baby! He's amazing, so driven."

When I asked CariDee why gay reality fans should tune into Pretty Wicked, she said the show is for anyone who has "a love and passion for a girl who makes your jaw drop. And we have ten girls on this show who will make your jaw drop over ... and over ... and over. You just can't believe that these girls think that the way they're living life is actually okay, and the change that they go through is so profound."