True romance

AS far as plots go, this one is far too far-fetched and romantic to feature in one of Ken Russell's films.

Indeed Elize and Ken Russell, who married in Beaulieu in August 2001, happily admit that their story is stranger than fiction.

The youngest of five children born into a family of journalists in North Carolina, Elize Tribble, who usually goes by the nickname Lisi, always knew she wanted to be an actress.

As a child she even went through a phase of pretending that she was from Plymouth and that her father was a fisherman for about three months.

"I was acting even then," she laughs.

As she got older and her acting progressed from make-believe to the beginnings of a profession, Lisi turned her attention to film and fell in love with the work of Southampton-born director Ken Russell.

Films such as Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972) had made her a huge fan of Russell - and the fact that she thought he was very good-looking didn't hurt either.

On impulse, she did what every fan worth their salt does - she wrote him a fan letter.

"I was so in love with Savage Messiah and had written Ken a fan letter on the back of a place mat and sent it to the studio where he was filming.

"I told him that I was going to be in New York studying acting and one morning he arrived at my door at nine in the morning," reminisces Lisi, still sounding a little like a surprised and delighted fan.

"Well you asked me to," interjects Ken. "You said: 'Do drop in,' I mean, I wouldn't have otherwise," he adds, as if internationally famous directors paid home visits to their fans all the time.

Although he did, indeed, have an invite, Ken hadn't crossed the Atlantic just to visit a fan.

He was in New York for the premiere of Tommy in 1975 and had decided to pop in on his admirer while he was in town.

Lisi still remembers the moment she answered a knock on her front door to find her idol standing on the other side of it as if it was this morning.

"It was an amazing surprise. I had two gentlemen sharing a bed in the living room that Ken had to step over.

"My bedroom was the only free area but my mum had told me never to take a man into the bedroom so I made Ken stand in the kitchen.

"My mum had never mentioned anything about men sleeping together in the living room so that was alright," she laughs.

"He was wonderful and he invited me to the premiere of Tommy and said I could take a guest. My friend said he knew the way but we got lost and we never made it to the premiere."

Even now, some 30 years later and more than three years into her marriage to Ken, Lisi still gets a bit misty-eyed at the memory of that first meeting.

"I remember everything about what he looked like. I remember he had a light all around him. He was so charming but we were both cripplingly shy," she says.

Ken's memory of the meeting isn't quite as vivid as Lisi's but he says: "I have a vague recollection of this flat and of a very striking girl and I thought: 'Pity I'm happily married,' bit I didn't stay married for long."

Lisi, a self-confessed mystic, believes that the universe was trying to get her and Ken together but, she says, "someone wasn't paying attention."

Ken and Lisi wrote to each other for a few years but eventually their correspondence fizzled out.

Lisi kept a picture of Ken up for the next 20 years but finally realised he was never going to call her and threw it away. Then, five years later, she found herself on the phone to him.

It was the late 1990s and, having been married and divorced three times, Ken was finding it difficult to find a partner.

Having had no luck with dating agencies he decided to advertise on his website for a wife.

The advert only got one response but the story ran in the New York Post, where it caught Lisi's eye.

"I thought one of his friends had done it as a joke because I could not imagine him not having a love," says Lisi.

She wrote Ken a charming letter and he knew his search was over. He invited her to come to the UK for the premiere of Lion's Mouth in 2000.

"The funny thing is, when we met, Ken was wearing a green coat with the lining out and I had the exact same coat but my friends had said: 'You can't wear that!' So I had a new coat on but there Ken was in the exact same coat that was the real me. I knew it was fate then."

Ken and Lisi married at a small ceremony in front of just four people at Beaulieu Abbey in "2001 I think... who's counting?" says Lisi, and they live happily in the New Forest with their dog Nipper, shooting and starring in feature films which they release onto DVD.

"There were times I'd get angry that it took us so long to get together, and I even cried a few times about it," admits Lisi.

"But then I've always found time a baffling commodity that co-operates in its own way and not mine.

"I certainly didn't feel cheated of anything. My watch runs on divine timing. It was fate."