Not strictly ballroom

THEM'S the breaks, so the urban saying goes.

Tell everyone you're off to London to see one Ms Jennifer Lopez at a press conference for her new film Shall We Dance? and what is bound to happen? She doesn't turn up.

Instead of her presence, we're given a nice sheet of A4 to console ourselves - her official statement in which she sends us her "warmest" and adds: "I very much wanted to be in London today, but unfortunately I am not well. At the advice of my doctors, I am unable to travel. Please accept my sincerest apologies as I shall have to remain in Los Angeles."

Cue many snide reactions that she's either pregnant or getting divorced.

But the show must go on - and the rest of our panel for the day, Richard Gere and the film's director Peter Chelsom, are ready for us.

And so, disappointment concealed behind brave smiles, the assembled press gets on with business.

The aforementioned film has so far earned big bucks at the US box office - and has yet to open in Europe or the home of its original version, Japan.

Based on the 1996 Shall We Dansu?, the movie focuses on Gere's character, John Clark, who is inspired to join a ballroom dancing class after he sees a mysterious lady staring out of a dance studio window.

Richard Tiffany Gere - I jest you not, that's his name - enters the room smiling broadly. Wearing a brown jacket, blue shirt and blue jeans, he's undoubtedly grey.

You'd be better asking my mum if he's handsome or not, as I fear he is just not my cup of tea - more a vintage selection, perhaps?

But his status as a sex symbol has forever been laid in stone since that definitive modern romantic gem, Pretty Woman.

Given that he played a tap-dancing lawyer in Chicago, winning a Golden Globe in the process, and now plays a ballroom dancing lawyer, is he going to try for three light-footed legal men in a row?

"What's another dance that I could do, because I've done tap dancing and ballroom dancing? I'm soliciting now for a Highland script. If one came my way, I'd be very happy."

He may be laughing now, but the preparation for the film took months of dedicated slog. Is such an intense schedule something he enjoys immersing himself in?

"Fear makes you prepare. The realisation that what you do on film is going to be there for a while - that's a good motivator, to be as good as you can get. And I was so bad at the beginning.

"Peter was there the first lesson I had and I think they all were kind of worried: 'Can he pull this off or not?' They showed up in the middle of it and it was horrible. It was horrible for a long time, really embarrassing and humiliating, but it actually ended up being quite good because we took a lot of stuff from the early rehearsals I had and put them in the movie.

"In my very first rehearsal, we were in a studio with a glass wall. There was this extraordinarily beautiful Argentinian girl who was doing the tango on the other side. I'm dancing so badly I can't believe it and I want to look good in front of this girl! But it was so much like we wanted the movie to be. We actually designed the room in the film to look like this very first one."

Peter, whose last film was 2001's romantic comedy Serendipity starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, is a deeply-tanned native of Blackpool, no less.

Given that he hadn't made a film in a few years, you'd think he would have been jumping at the chance to get back behind the camera, but, as he reveals, he was slightly reluctant to take on a remake.

"I passed," he says. "I lied and said I'd read the script when Miramax sent it to me, because I didn't want to remake such a perfect original - I'd loved the Japanese movie. But they sent me the script again a year later and said that there had been substantial rewrites, and there had been none whatsoever. And I said it was much better!

"I think the thing I saw in Audrey Wells' script was the fact that it could translate to America and it was the same story, with a different filter, and I saw that it could work.

"The Japanese movie relies on that taboo in Japan about ballroom dancing per se, whereas, with the American movie, the taboo is that if you're living the American dream, there's a certain shame involved in raising your hand and saying, 'This is not enough, I'm not happy'."

Fifty-five-year-old Gere came late to settled family life, his partner Carey Lowell having given birth to their son Homer in 2000. Did he ever experience any restlessness similar to that of his character?

"Mine happened much earlier," he says, bringing a hand up to touch his glasses. "I was a teenager. I looked around and thought the world was dissonant, it wasn't what it appeared to be or what I was being told it was. There was more love, more openness, freedom, liberation and the possibility of getting past the boundaries of the self.

"The film is very much about repression. It's not just the material stuff, the house, the car etc - this is not a dysfunctional household. There's wit, charm and love and affection and sex - they have everything seemingly on all levels, but there's this yearning for something else, something more.

"I think this is very relevant to our problems in the West. We have it all. But it's not about a traditional mid-life crisis. We took great pains to make it not about that. It's more about that mysterious yearning, which became manifest in my character seeing this melancholy girl Jennifer Lopez's character. The poetry of that I thought was really beautiful.

"It was also like, 'We want you to do this movie and, unfortunately, you've got to spend two or three months with the most beautiful women on the planet and learn to dance with them'. Oh boy."

Did learning the moves have any big pay-off for him in real-life, to help him seduce his own wife?

"It had one big pay-off! After we finished shooting, my wife and I had been married for at least a year, and we hadn't ever got around to having a wedding party. My wife had been taking lessons with the dance teachers in the movie. I knew she'd been taking a couple but I didn't know she'd been taking a lot.

"So we had a band there and my wife said to me 'Let's dance for people', and we had one of those spotlight dances. We started, and it was skimming and dipping and it was like I was doing routines for the movie and she knew them all and took the lead.

"It was a magic moment. Her family was there and my family was there, all of our friends, and really, it was a moment out of a film.

"Her family had always said she had two left feet, so for them to see her move like an angel, so light, so beautiful - that was great." Aw.

And then he has all the ladies swooning again when he responds to the final question of who would be his ideal partner?

"It's my wife, absolutely. No one else."

Pass the smelling salts please - for my mother, of course.