I was watching American football, televised from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the other night with my wife, Elize, when a long-lost memory came to mind. “If a boy really loved a girl, he’d kiss her in the middle of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.” I was all for it, provided I could be teleported without leaving the settee.

There was a time when no distance would have been too great, when that glamorous girl first spoke those words to her sailor boy. The girl was Dorothy Lamour in The Fleet’s In (1942). Daring all while serving as a cadet at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, I broke bounds to see her on the big screen. I was beaten, but it was a small price to pay. I was in love. I wrote as much to her, and gratifyingly received a signed photograph in return.

Alas, I never did get to meet her, either in the Rose Bowl or anywhere. But I shall never forget her, nor the smoochy nightclub singer she played – the Countess – who remains one of my favourite movie characters.

Certain characters magnify their own peculiarities to become larger than life. They are eccentrically mythic – no matter how ill-fitting the part or plot may be to your life, the characters as written and acted insist on leaving the screen and following you home, like the Moon over your shoulder.

Another such first appeared in another black-and-white movie a long time ago, in 1954. Federico Fellini’s La Strada features the director’s wife, Giulietta Masina, in a heartrending performance as a female clown, Gelsomina, who partners a hard-hearted strongman in his act after her mother sells her to a carnival. Further poignancy is added by Nino Rota’s music.

Another fabulous female character who sticks in my mind is Queen Elizabeth II, as played by Helen Mirren. I had the honour of meeting the former – I believe we discussed the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love. In an Oscar-winning performance, Mirren created an astonishingly rich portrayal of the Queen as a head of state with weighty responsibilities, whose private life is so inaccessible as to be nearly unimaginable. Another grande dame I only admired from afar was Margaret Dumont . Groucho fondly called her “the sixth Marx Brother”. She was the aristocratic woman of substance in many a Marx Brothers movie, where she invariably rose above the ill-mannered insults of whichever opportunistic trickster Groucho might be playing. She always pretended not to notice his wisecracks. Groucho: “Why don’t we get married? I can see you now, bending over a hot stove. But I can’t see the stove!”

How gracious, how gorgeous that lady was – the epitome of class and warmly human. W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Jack Benny and Abbott and Costello also hired her to provide dignity to comic effect in their movies.

But I must also confess a fascination for a creature more brittle and colder. I’m referring to Maria, the steel robot (played by Brigitte Helm) in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Apart from the fact that we are the same age, it’s intriguing to me that time has not ravaged her one iota, nor diminished my infatuation.

Equally fascinating, but completely human, is Elizabeth Taylor as Laura Reynolds, a renegade artist and unmarried mother, in The Sandpiper (1965) . It’s a film ahead of its time. “You told her about me? How could you tell anyone about me – much less your own wife?” The first feminist role model, Reynolds delivers blisteringly frank remarks to put her lover in his place. It makes her seem all the more intelligent and desirable, although it’s hard to believe that her character’s free spirit would have endorsed those sexy tight pants. Filmed in the flush of her first marriage to Richard Burton, the chemistry between them is electric.

Before we leave the ladies, I must mention Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933), in which she plays Lady Lou, that saucy vamp of the Gay Nineties. The wiggle, the hourglass figure, the double entendres, the sideways look – she remains one of the screen’s most enduring characters.

My prime contender for favourite male character is that man for all seasons, Rufus T. Firefly, from Duck Soup – alias Captain Spaulding, the African explorer (“Did someone call me schnorrer?”), from Animal Crackers – played by Groucho Marx. That painted-on moustache, that crouching walk (like an inept private eye), that unlit cheap cigar (from which he continually flicks nonexistent ash), that knowing glance at the audience that lets us in on the gag, have kept me chuckling for more than 50 years.

Of course, I couldn’t fail to mention my old mate over many years, Oliver Reed. He imbued every part he played with the breath of life. I shall never forget his slave dealer, Proximo, in his last film, Gladiator (2000). Not only was his portrayal as passionate and dramatic as ever, but he died in character, while besting a queue of Maltese sailors at arm-wrestling. His resurrection topped even that. Olly will go down in history as the first actor to complete a movie (thanks to CGI) after he was dead and buried.

The other character in my ten best list you must have guessed already. The glamorous, vulnerable and “totally cutting-edge” duo Romy and Michele, played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, those inseparable flatmates bound for their high-school reunion with exaggerated resumés and loveable optimism.

No, I haven’t miscounted. It’s a tribute to their ability to complement each other’s performance that their double act in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) makes them unforgettably one.

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