Dumb brush with fame: William Hurt, Richard Chamberlain, the Queen

Meeting notable people is never what you expect.

The Queen and Prince Philip greet locals on arrival in Sydney during a visit in the 1970s.

It was the late 1980s and William Hurt was in Paris promoting his film The Accidental Tourist. I was in Paris, too, and more specifically in a lift at Hotel de Crillon.

Hurt’s character on screen was Macon Leary, author of travel guides “for reluctant business travellers”. I had written travel guides, too, ­although not ones like Leary’s, which contained boring data such as the number of coathangers to expect in hotel wardrobes and the thickness of the mattress.

Hurt got into the lift as it was closing. He was (and is still) a big chap with the shoulders of a hurling man. I had pressed ­Fermez ­instead of Ouvrez, not ­because I don’t understand French but the sight of Hurt rendered me so dumbstruck that I lost the capa­city to function. He was ­almost squashed by the shutting doors and I moved to the back of the lift, mortified at my ­mistake.

He pressed his floor button and noticed I had not done the same. “A quel etage?” he asked me in a passable French ­accent. I knew my floor number — seventh. I even knew the French word. I was thrilled that he thought I was French and therefore automatically desirable. But I stared at my feet, unable to speak, ­albeit revelling in my new Frenchness. “Um, English?” he persisted. “What floor?” Oh, if only that floor would swallow me whole.

I held up seven fingers. Yes, ­really, so strike me, well, dumb ­actually. So Hurt decided I was mute and seemed to be arranging his fingers ready to sign to me but then we arrived at his floor, one lower than mine, and he shot me a puzzled look before he left, his fabulous trench coat billowing in great manly swirls.

My Parisian friend Odette was aghast when I told her. “Why did you not produce a chocolate or a slice of cheese from your pocket, press the emergency button and tell him your picnic could sustain you both for hours before help ­arrived?” I never carry chocolate or cheese, I replied. “Then you will never survive in France,” she sniffed.

“Chocolate! Fromage! Urgency!” I practised for hours, up and down in the lift at Hotel de Crillon, but Hurt never reappeared. If he had, there was no guarantee Odette’s plan would have worked. I imagine he’d have backed away tout de suite from the silent picnicker who now smelled of day-old roquefort.

Susan Kurosawa

Dam observations with Dr Kildare

Late in February 1985, I found ­myself in Harare on a last-minute holiday before returning to Australia after five years in London on The Times.

I had, days earlier, signed on to be news editor of The Australian. I stayed with a friend’s brother in the city. We drove around for a few weeks in a borrowed car and had adventures I can hardly ­believe we survived. Shot at. Jailed briefly in Zambia as spies. And other frightening episodes that still raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

As my fortnight in Africa drew to a close, I stayed in Zimbabwe’s capital hoping nothing else would happen. I had just a few days left. I went to the Zimbabwe parliament to see former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith in action. He was still a member. I stood in a queue for some time but when I got to the door I was refused entry ­because I didn’t have a tie.

Coincidentally, days earlier, fleeing a car of locals who had shadowed my movements for days, I drove for kilometres to the Masvingo Zimbabwe Sun hotel, which, I believe, had been Cecil Rhodes’s house at one point.

I drove with relief into the compound, itself far from any ­humanity. At the door there I was greeted by a young bloke in a crumpled shirt and jacket. I told him that I would like to have dinner and perhaps to stay for the night. I could stay the night but dinner was not on the cards. I didn’t have a tie.

The place was empty. Mine was the only car in the carpark, such as it was. But rules were rules.

Did I mention that it rained heavily almost every day I was in Zimbabwe? Anyway, with 72 hours to go, I heard on the radio that a dam outside Harare that had been years in the making was about to overflow and that the spillway would be a perhaps spectacular scene. Why not?

I drove there and was soon among the thatched huts of village life in Africa. I had crude ­instructions and they got me there, eventually.

As I turned down the little bush track to the dam, but still some kilometres away, I chanced upon three casually but well dressed Westerners walking in the same direction. Hearing my car engine, they went into single file to let me pass. ­Intrigued by who they might be, I looked back as I passed and stopped suddenly. I jumped out. “You are Dr Kildare!” I said to the bloke in the middle, forgetting at that ­moment that his name was Richard Chamberlain. “My mum loves you.”

A day later he was there again in the Monomotapa Bar in Harare. I said g’day, but he was with a group of Americans and I let him be. I was struck, though by the beautiful blonde by his side. And so passed up my only opportunity of meeting Sharon Stone.

Alan Howe

Will sir take tea with the Queen?

In the late 1970s, at the start of my decade working in Port Moresby, I was invited, with a half-dozen Papua New Guinean journalists, to a brief meet-and-greet with the Queen and Prince Philip at the old veranda-ed Government House in Hanuabada.

After handshakes, we were expecting to file quietly away when a lady-in-waiting asked if we would like to stay for an ­unplanned afternoon tea. She ­explained that their majesties felt relaxed here in an out-of-the-way tropical haven, after a testing post-Dismissal tour of Australia, and wished to wind down by ­chatting with some non-important — though she was too well-mannered to use such a phrase — locals.

None of us appeared to have more pressing engagements, so we stayed and spoke with the royal couple for about an hour.

I talked with the prince about pidgin, since one of the papers in the local group I worked with was Wantok, still the world’s only ­pidgin newspaper. Philip claimed his favourite phrase was grab ­biltong as (pronounced arse, hil­ariously) biltong kakaruk — chic­ken feathers.

The Queen, it soon became clear, is a very smart and well-informed woman with a drier sense of humour than her husband. We discussed development challenges in PNG, her son Prince Charles’s brief sojourn in Oro province on a Geelong Grammar exchange with Martyrs’ School and the recent Ashes series.

She described my question as to which cricket team she supported, as head of state of both countries, as “very naughty”. She said that when the naval ship ­accompanying the royal yacht Britannia semaphored a message about an England defeat: “They thought I couldn’t read the flags because they used a rude signal — they were wrong!”

And so the afternoon wound on, until the sun started setting over beautiful Fairfax Harbour, and the royal couple apologised that they needed to change for dinner, and withdrew.

Rowan Callick