Pamela Marvin was in Ireland for a few days prior to her tour this week of the U.K. to promote her book, 'Lee'. I met her in County Wicklow where I found her composing herself, slightly teary-eyed, after watching the coverage of Princess Diana's funeral. 'I've been so touched, thinking about her and her boys, and the light she brought to the world.' Pamela is a softly spoken lady of great charm and gentle manners. But there must be steel inside; she was married for seventeen years to Lee Marvin.

Her book, which is subtitled 'A Romance', is an extraordinary tale of two lives, hers and Lee's, a tale of their meeting, their divergence, and their final coming together. Here is that most unusual of things, a Hollywood marriage that worked, right up to Lee's death ten years ago.

The story begins in Woodstock in upstate New York where Pamela and Lee were childhood sweethearts in the 1950s. Lee leaves for fame and fortune in Hollywood, Pamela gets married to another actor; the first of three marriages before her eventual marriage to Lee. Twenty years later, his marriage over and her third marriage over, he arrives in Woodstock and walks into her kitchen. 'You know I've come to get you, don't you?' he asks and whisks her away to a new life. This moment is the fulcrum of the book.

'At that time I had four children, I was broke, no luxuries, everything was such a struggle - and within a week I was living in Malibu, and married to a famous movie star. Suddenly I was on top of the world.'

From here the book chronicles their life together, their shared obsession with marlin fishing - for five years Pamela held the world record for Atlantic marlin - and, of course, it covers his wild excesses and drinking bouts.

It has taken six of the last ten years to write this book. She was encouraged to do it by their friend, the director John Boorman, who wrote the foreword. John and Lee had worked together on 'Point Blank' and 'Hell in the Pacific' and remained life-long friends. During these past years she produced over 1,200 pages, prompting me to ask how such a prodigious feat of memory was accomplished.

'It's odd, when you start it's almost as if you're going back in time, you see it in front of you, you see people's expressions: it's like a tableau. It comes back.'

So what happened to the 800 pages that aren't in this book?

'I have this wonderful editor at Faber called Walter Donoghue who felt that four to five hundred pages was as much as anyone could digest. So when I'd got it down to 700 and couldn't take out any more I was stuck. Walter read it and said we should take out the middle section - which covered our experiences on movies - and make that into another book. It'll be more like a biography with lots and lots of photographs.'

Pamela Marvin does not talk easily about herself. Our conversation kept returning to Lee. She is as fiercely loyal to his memory as she was to him. This finds expression in the longest section of her book, about half of it, which covers the court case between Lee and Michelle Triola. This was the case in 1979 which coined the term 'palimony' and brought Triola's attorney Marvin Mitchelson notoriety. In essence Triola and Mitchelson were claiming that as a live-in lover Triola had the property rights of a wife and that, as such, she was entitled to half of his property and earnings. By the time it came to court Lee and Pamela had been married for nine years, and they faced what turned out to be a three-month trauma together. In the end Triola lost her case on every count, but arriving at this happy conclusion was a harrowing process.

This section was the main reason for the length of the book's gestation. 'It wasn't an important trial, it just took on a life of its own. Probably it could only have happened in America. Unfortunately it left a lasting impression. Even friends misconstrued a lot. That's why I decided to really go into it. I studied eight thousand pages of transcript from which I gleaned 187 pages. I wanted to make my point, to disprove accusations with testimony that was sprinkled throughout the eight thousand pages. I think that this probably accounts for a lot of the six years.'

Early on, Triola had been prepared to settle for less money than Lee eventually paid his lawyers. But for Lee it was a matter of principle and he refused to settle. Pamela agreed with this.

'It was something he really had to defend himself against, because it really did malign his character.'

The level of press attention to this trial was enormous and Lee was unwilling to call friends as witnesses because he didn't want to expose them to the media jackals. Yet despite his objections they turned up to refute Triola's manufactured claims. Once again his old friend John Boorman is there in the transcripts, matching the aggressive Mitchelson parry for parry, establishing truth in place of lies.

Pamela Marvin is aware that eighteen years have past since those allegations were printed daily, and that it's hard to make the truth come out. The lies and innuendoes remain. 'Most people seem to think that Lee lost the case. Yet the personalities of the two people who brought the case (Triola and Mitchelson) were awful. It was also interesting in a way that anyone could be that way. How many people have someone like that in their lives?' The hurt and the injustice of having to fend off malicious allegations while the press delved deeply into every aspect of their lives still rankles. 'It seemed so unfair.'

A defining part of Lee's life was his time as a marine. He served in the Pacific during the Second World War, often as part of advance landing parties. He left the war decorated with the Purple Heart for bravery, and a wound in his buttocks which he found more than a little humiliating. For Pamela it was a mixture of his marine training and his actor's ability to control his emotions that enabled him to survive the rigours of the trial.

Both Pamela and Lee come from old New England families with a pedigree stretching back to the early colonists. 'It's quite possible that our families, the Downers and the Marvins, arrived on the same ship; they certainly arrived in the same year. And Lee's mother was descended from George Washington's brother Augustine.' There is an unmistakable pride in this. Woodstock is pivotal: it's where they grew up, where they first met, and where after twenty years they take up where they'd left off. 'It's a small village. When I was growing up it had tops maybe two thousand people, a mix of farmers, artists and writers. Not very different from where we are now in the Wicklow hills. It was a wonderful place to grow up.'

I ask Pamela to sum up Lee Marvin, the man she knew and loved. 'He was an actor, a marine, an angler from the age of four, a great reader, very eloquent with a down-to-earth style, and very intellectual.'

Lee Marvin the actor is immortalised in his films and in this book, the angler by the many huge 1,000 pound marlin that he caught, and the marine - the war hero - was buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington with full military honours.