How Michael Winner cheated death

After I ring the doorbell at the gate to Michael Winner's west London mansion, a woman by the name of Joanna trots down the garden path to open it. After she locks it behind her again, we clatter over the original tiled floor in the elegant hall and then wade through the deep carpet pile to a room called "the cinema". There's a battered director's chair bearing the words "Michael Winner", and the walls are adorned with black-and-white stills of actors and actresses. Among them are shots of Winner himself looking every bit the dashing young film director, complete with megaphone, though I doubt he needed it. Underneath a signed photo of Marilyn Monroe is a framed album sleeve of the Death Wish soundtrack. And for those still in doubt of Winner's notoriety, in a glass cabinet next to the bar at the back of the room is what looks like the original Winner Spitting Image puppet, with its enormous long neck and equally long nose.

After a while Joanna returns. Michael can't manage the steps, she explains, so I'm to go upstairs. Marooned in an armchair in the vast sitting room is the famous curmudgeon, his left leg in a protective splint, and a walking stick resting on a footstool next to him. He is drinking a protein milkshake given to him by one of two attending private nurses. His perfectly ironed blue shirt hangs like a windless sail against his now slender torso. Alarmingly, when he holds out his thumb and index finger and measures how close he recently came to dying, his hand shakes. He looks so frail encased within the patterned upholstery that I find myself raising my voice as if addressing an elderly relative in an old people's home.

Michael Winner has cheated death not once but four times over the last few months. He was taking his annual Christmas holiday with his partner Geraldine Lynton-Edwards at the exclusive Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados, when, on 1 January, he started shaking violently. Fortunately Philip Green, the billionaire retailer, overruled Winner's insistence that he wanted to have his lunch, and helped him to his room. "I was really falling to pieces," Winner admits. "Blood everywhere, no control of my organs."

The following day he woke up to find fat, black blisters covering his leg from his ankle to his thigh, which poured blood when he squeezed them. An ambulance was immediately called. "On the way to the hospital my blood pressure was so low they were convinced I would die there and then. They were pinching me and doing anything they could to bring me back to life. It was one of four times when I was near to death as you can ever be. In the hospital I was told I was in Princess Margaret's room. I thought 'She died, so that's not very encouraging.' Nobody knew what I had. Nobody knows about this illness in England. Nobody knows about fibrious figgificous or whatever it is."

Winner, 71, had ingested Vibrio vulnificus - a bacteria that lives in warm water - via an infected oyster. It can kill people in less than 32 hours. Having a fatty liver and suffering from slight diabetes put Winner at risk of a severe reaction. Geraldine, who sampled the same batch of oysters, was unaffected. "What happens is a complete collapse of all your organs. Your liver, your kidneys, everything collapses. In the key literature I've got it says that 95 per cent of people die within two days," he says bleakly.

As everyone scratched their heads in hospital wondering what was wrong, Green stepped in again and ordered an air ambulance to get him back to the UK. "He saved my life," says Winner. "If he hadn't done that I'd have either died in hospital, or had a leg amputated there."

Winner booked himself into the private London Clinic. "When I got there no one thought I would keep the leg and most of them thought I would die anyway." Given that private medicine doesn't necessarily attract the country's best doctors, I ask why he chose the London Clinic over the NHS. Winner looks momentarily horrified. "Well, darling, if I may say, that's quite a remarkable question. On the whole private medicine is more efficient, and you get it when you want it. On top of the London Clinic nurses, I employed my own nurses day and night. I wanted to be sure that if I rang the bell a nurse would appear. If you employ your own you know things are going to happen a bit quicker."

Neither did anyone at the London Clinic know what was making him so ill. It wasn't until two or three weeks later that his dermatologist stumbled upon the bacterium. "He happened to go to India to lecture and he heard about it there. And then he went on to Washington to lecture, and he stayed for the next talk which was about killer tropical diseases and up came this Vibrio vulnificus. He came back and said 'I now know what it is.'"

Winner was in hospital for three months, during which time he says he would have committed suicide had he had the means. "No question in the early days if I had had a gun or some poison I would have shot myself or taken it. I was in great pain all the time. It was a desperate situation. I was wondering whether I would walk again. I had 11 operations in five weeks under general anaesthetic. That alone would kill most people. The trouble was during the first six the plastic surgeon would open up the leg and it was rotting. It was disappearing in front of her so she would cut bits off to stop it spreading. During the cutting - and she had to do it - she cut off my achilles tendon. So I'll always have a funny walk. Mind you, I wasn't exactly going in for the London marathon."

He says he received thousands of cards while in hospital. "It was very touching. People said 'We've always loved you'. 'We wish you better'. 'We're your greatest fans'. 'You're a real gent'. Andrew Lloyd Webber sent things, so did Michael Caine. Tony Blair wrote a very nice letter. I've known Tony for years. I'm very fond of him. I think he's a very warm, decent person."

He estimates that the illness will have cost him at least £750,000. Despite his adverts, he has no medical insurance. "Like everybody else, you think, 'I'm never going to be ill. Or if I am ill I could afford to pay for it.'" Thankfully the film director, who made his name with the Death Wish series and made a fortune in property, has the means.

He has been home for almost three weeks and is learning to walk again with the help of physiotherapists. There is a chance that he will always have to use a splint, and he will certainly have to wear a support stocking as so many of his veins were removed. The experience has certainly not curtailed his adoration of food, though since his illness he has dropped another stone. He had already lost an enormous amount of weight, having tipped the scales at 15st 10lb at one point. His book, The Fat Pig Diet, is coming out in November. "I went to the River Café on Saturday, and the Wolseley on Sunday. I've been to Scott's with Michael Caine. When it first started I had to have the ambulance and wheelchair. Now I can get in and out with one stick quite easily." But he won't touch raw seafood again. "Anybody who eats raw fish is asking for trouble - oysters, sushi, anywhere. It is highly dangerous. The seas have become so contaminated."

He insists he hasn't changed. "Believe me, you can almost die several times and not be a changed person. Why should it change you? You don't see angels coming to get you and saying 'We've booked a very good table for you Michael, with Marlon Brando and Orson Welles.'" But he has since got engaged to Geraldine, 66, whom he says has been "incredible" throughout the ordeal and talked him back from death in the ambulance in Barbados. So will he actually go through with the wedding? "It took me 71 years to get engaged so I wouldn't buy a new suit for the wedding," he replies. "It's not a guarantee, but we'll see."

Why does he think he's got a mental block when it comes to marriage? "Some people say it was because of my mother who was very eccentric. But I'm not prepared to go to a psychiatrist to find out why. It's too boring. I'm still shaking with fear at having got engaged. I wake up in a cold sweat at night. So marriage could finish me off completely."

But will he be faithful to her? "Of course I'll be faithful to Geraldine on this occasion," he says. "I was never faithful to anybody, I could never resist anything. I always had affairs, the girls knew about it. I have no morality in that sense whatsoever and I certainly now intend to be totally faithful. I just feel there comes a time when you have to stop being the playboy of the Western world."

Vibrio vulnificus - the facts

* Vibrio vulnificus causes 95 per cent of all seafood-related deaths. It is a bacterium from the same family that causes cholera.

* It lives in warm seawater and affects those who eat contaminated seafood or have an open wound that is exposed to the water.

* It can cause vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain - in the healthy. Most infections are acute and have no long-term consequences. However, it can rapidly kill those whose immune systems are compromised.

* Vibrio vulnificus can infect the bloodstream, causing a severe and life-threatening illness called primary septiceamia, which is characterised by fever, chills, septic shock and death. Blistering skin legions are also common.

* Oysters are the frequent source of Vibrio vulnificus infections, since they usually eaten raw.

* The majority of infections originated in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The peak incidences occur in the summer. America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention receives about 90 reports a year linked to the disease.

* Each year in the US, Vibrio vulnificus infects an estimated 80 people and causes 16 deaths. Many more cases may go unrecorded. In Louisiana there was a spate of cases after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

* Global warming may increase the bacterium's presence in Europe.

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