Reader, he touched my knee. Fleetingly, it has to be admitted. And by mistake. Antonio Banderas, “King of the Nights” ( Hola!); “One of the Most Beautiful People in the World” ( People), and “This film’s only redeeming feature” (reviews of every movie he’s made since Zorro), was just crescendoing in his description of how he played Puss in Boots in Shrek the Third. “I wanted to provide a voice that was stronger,” he was saying in still heavily accented come-to-bed English, and then, more gravelly: “It is the voice. Of A. Conquistador.” For emphasis, Antonio Banderas swiped the air and so accidentally skimmed my patella. “Interesting,” I lied, making a note to self to tell everyone I knew. The women I knew almost threw up with jealousy.

People like to joke that Banderas is so one-dimensional an actor that of course he’s ended up, at the age of 48, playing the voice of a 10in animated cat. But the cat worked. Ask any eight-year-old. When the ginger tom with meaningful eyes first appeared in Shrek 2, he produced enough of a ripple for producers to start planning a biopic. Puss in Boots: The Movie is due for a 2010 release and will tell “the story of how Puss in Boots became who he is”.

Banderas has yet to read the script but hears from Dreamworks that the film will stray from the boisterous and archly allusive Shrek formula: Puss, The Times can exclusively reveal, was orphaned as a kitten in Seville. In a quiet moment the studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg took Banderas to one side: “He told me, ‘Antonio, it’s going to be really emotional. There will be moments when there will be tears in your eyes.’ ” Puss in Boots, the little cat with the personality of a swashbuckling Latin heartbreaker, parodies not only Zorro but Banderas as a young man, before he settled down and dropped off the top of the Most Gorgeous lists. “Puss in Boots is a bit as I was in the Eighties: a little bit Casanova, a little bit Don Giovanni.” There was no wistfulness there as he lit up a cigarette, only a vague, amused pride.

The Eighties is a good place to start the Antonio Banderas story.

BACKGROUND

• Shrek the Third

• Shrek the Third

• Game Review - Shrek The Third

• Shrek turns to shrink

• How an ogre became a cash cow . . . and a turkey

BACKGROUND

• Shrek 2

• Shrek Review: they've created a monster

Antonio Banderas – he’s a cool cat

These days he may be best known as a CGI moggy in Shrek movies, but Antonio Banderas still does a passable global sex god

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He had moved to Madrid from his home town, Mála-ga, and very rapidly became famous in Spain for his fine acting in five of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, as well as his good looks and off-screen affairs. In between takes, Banderas was fun and adventurous and wildly promiscuous (“romantic” is how he puts it).

Officially Banderas’s Hollywood breakthrough came with The Mambo Kings in 1992, for which he learnt his part phonetically. But the film that turned him into the new focus of international female longing was In Bed with Madonna in 1991, which showed him politely rebuffing the world’s most famous pop star.

In fact, he arrived in America a married man. His wife was the actress Ana Leza. His fans could take it because Leza was largely invisible outside Spain and, so, ignorable. What they couldn’t take was when, in 1996, he hooked up with Melanie Griffith, then a highly visible, occasionally drug-addled and vulnerable Don Johnson survivor with an alleged addiction to plastic surgery. The combined jealousy of millions of women worldwide found expression in a still relentless barrage of cruelty directed at Griffith. “Why her?” is the angry question that crops up over and over on Antonio Banderas fan sites. They have been together now for ten years and have a daughter.

“You have to think that love is a very difficult word to describe,” he says. “There are poets that try to define that. I just fell in love and I don’t want to intellectualise my relationship. I prefer not to be conscious about why I feel absolutely comfortable with my wife and kids.”

Banderas memorably urged his wife to wean herself off plastic surgery. But while the Griffith-baiters spend hours poring over pictures of her wrinkled face, not much mention is made of the fact that Banderas’s own looks have started to fade. The eyes are more tired, the skin a little rougher. Where now for an ageing former Lothario? Recently he’s played on Broadway and directed his first film, El Camino de los Ingleses.

As an actor, he says, finally there’s been a change: his accent has improved and he has cracked down on his agents “You fight your asses to get something for me that I like,” was his rallying call. If his career path has meandered, it bothers him less than one would have assumed. “I don’t believe in careers, I just picture myself always as one of those old actors from the 19th century who go from village to village in their repertoire.”

So, he is playing the Bolivian general René Barrientos for Steven Soderbergh and has been cast as Federico Fellini in an interesting-sounding feature about the director’s lost days in Los Angeles. Next year Banderas will stage-direct Carmen at La Scala. Long-term, his ambition is to get at least three good character roles under his belt and leave California: “We will end up living in Spain. My wife and I have a very limited social life. When you see actors on the red carpet they seem to know each other but really it’s like a wax museum. Los Angeles is probably one of the fakest cities in the world. For me it is a working place.”

Banderas is a likeable man with no palpable side. For an actor, he is unusually candid and steers clear of the stock responses of so many people in the entertainment business. Love, in particular, is a subject he can go on about for ever, although some of his female fans may find what he says hard to digest: “What type of person would I be if I don’t go with the person I love because of what my fans think? With Melanie I feel absolutely centred. Whole. As a man, with my wife. I don’t miss anything either, nothing! And those ladies that are out there, I’m sorry but . . .”

The sentence is left unfinished but the implication is clear. I might be wrong but, ladies, I don’t think Antonio Banderas is available.

Shrek the Third is released nationwide on Friday

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