I realise it’s not gentlemanly to just start drinking at this point. But in my defence the lady’s late, a full hour. And in the yawning mid-afternoon lull at the fabled Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, there’s really not much else to do.

Plus, I need to loosen up a bit. There’s a certain pressure that builds when you’re waiting for a woman whom you – all of us – have desired at a distance for a good 18 years now. Just a harmless crush, one of those inchoate billboard fantasies you have when you’re a boy full of urges. And that’s what I was in 1994 when The Mask came out, starring Jim Carrey and a vat of green make-up. It was Cameron Diaz’s very first film, and she came dancing onto the world stage with those impossible legs and sparkling blue eyes. She looked like happiness, a tall drink of California sunshine. It was one of those “who’s that girl?” moments – like when Halle Berry showed up in The Flintstones, or Megan Fox appeared in Transformers. Not the kind of movies that you’d think would trigger a flood of carnal longing, but still.

Ah, here she is now, as blonde as the day is long, scuttling through the lobby looking this way and that. She’s thinner and smaller than you might think, but then they usually are, especially the girls. And she’s brought her legs with her, I see – they start somewhere in the heavens with a pair of little shorts and come sliding down, all warm and bronze, into two simple white deck shoes. Arguably the finest pins at the multiplex, even at her age, which by the time you read this will start with a four (not that you could tell).

She spots me and comes over, a fountain of apologies. Something about her previous appointment dragging, and contractors at the house and of the traffic on Sunset on a Friday afternoon… “I feel so terrible,” she says. Then she removes her big brown shades, and you can tell from her eyes that she actually means it. It’s fine, Cameron, I tell her. Let’s have a cocktail, it’s Friday afternoon, start of the weekend. “Do you know, I’m going straight – a soy latte would be my choice at the moment.” But I just ordered a Manhattan. Now I feel bad. “Hey, go for it. If you get too drunk, I’ll carry you out and put you in a cab. Don’t worry- I’ve got my eye on you.”

Well, that makes two of us. It’s hard to take your eyes off Diaz. As you can tell from the photographs on these pages, her body is still a thing of wonder. And there’s no trickery, either. When she does that wide smile that you’ve seen a million times, there’s the whisper of a crinkle at the pinch of her eyes, but that’s about it – the rest is all taut and airbrushed and dipped in honey.

The drinks arrive, and she cups her bowl of coffee like a chalice, blowing sweetly over the surface. “OK, so what have you got for me? What are we here for?” It’s a fair question. We’re here for the trillionth celebrity interview at the Chateau Marmont, a genre unto itself by now. But the A-list interview is a peculiar dance. Though we laugh and drink and, yes, sometimes flirt, there is all the while a subcutaneous tussle going on. The writer digging for frankness, the kind you hear from people you’ve known for years rather than minutes, while the star gamely dodges and parries. It’s my job to peek behind the curtain, to coax something from Cameron that she does not want to give. And this isn’t her first time at the rodeo.

We begin with her latest movie, Gambit, starring Colin Firth and Alan Rickman. Set in London, and reminiscent of old Peter Sellers movies (it’s actually a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine film), it’s a rollicking art heist caper written by the Coen brothers, in which Cameron plays a Texas rodeo queen. It’s possibly one of the campest movies she’s made – complete with elements of bedroom farce – the kind of film in which stuffy Englishmen lose their pants and middle-aged ladies fart with gusto. Cameron’s rodeo queen is suitably cartoonish – she turns the yeehaw up to 11.

“The words were really hard to say,” she says. “I was happy to hear Colin Firth, who has said the hardest words ever on stage, for him to say, ‘these are tough words’… so for the American girl from Long Beach, who has never done theatre and is linguistically challenged as it is, I kind of wiped my brow.” It’s funny for such an accomplished actress to pull the blonde card like that, talking about difficult words. You’d never think that she’s worked with Malkovich, Scorsese or Pacino. “Yes, but Colin and Alan are British stage actors, they’ve done Shakespeare. Me, I do a lot of face acting.” She points to her face, lets her smile fall flat and looks at me utterly deadpan. “I’m doing it now.” Then she bursts into laughter. “Did you see me emote? I was doing it! Oh, man!”

This is Cameron. She’s endearing, sweet, a charming talker and effusive on the topic of London and how she loves it so, now the restaurants have got so much better and, oh, which bit are you from? When did you move to LA…? Observe how friendly she is, what an attentive listener, how she makes this conversation as much about me as her. Notice how she tries to disrupt my focus by leaning forward in that blowsy white top and touching me first on the hand, then the knee. I know her game. It’s not easy remembering what your next question is while she’s laughing at your jokes and maintaining eye contact. And how’s a man meant to concentrate with that get-up of hers? I can just picture her at home, looking at her wardrobe: “Who is it today – some boy journalist from Esquire? I know, I’ll wear my tiny pink shorts, the ones that clasp my world famous buttocks and offset my spectacular thighs. That’ll fuck him up.” Fair play, Cameron. Ding-ding: round one.

Here’s what we know. We know we like her because we can’t stop lining up for her movies. It’s no mystery why she nets the big dollars and why the studios keep calling. Take Bad Teacher last year – it had a budget of $20 million, but made $216 million worldwide. That’s just one example. There’s also There’s Something About Mary, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Being John Malkovich, Any Given Sunday, Gangs of New York, Vanilla Sky, both Charlie’s Angels movies and the entire Shrek franchise.

© 2012 Esquire (UK).