Charlotte Rampling, 76, recalls flirting with Russell Crowe, 58, before he became a huge movie star

Charlotte Rampling collected the time she enjoyed a flirt with Russell Crowe before he hit the big time in his acting career.

The Oscar-nominated actress, who leapt to prominence in Georgy Girl – ‘a doll never out of trouble’ – recalls co-starring with Russell, 58, in 1993 Australian romantic drama Hammers Over The Anvil.

And still bewitching at 76, Charlotte was in the mood for disclosure.

At the time, she was married to philandering French musician Jean-Michel Jarre, now 73, while Crowe was in an on-off relationship with actress Danielle Spencer, who later became his wife.

And speaking to The Daily Mail’s Richard Eden, Charlotte said that the younger Russell was: ‘A very attractive young man’, explaining that it was before Crowe, now ‘became huge’ thanks to films including 2000’s Gladiator.

She went on: ‘I had a flirt. You could leave it at that.’

Last year, she acknowledged that, in the 1960s, she enjoyed a menage a trois with Bryan Southcombe, later her first husband, and model Randall Laurence, but had for years denied it because her parents were ‘quite conventional’.

Speaking about her relationships, she explained to The Guardian: ‘Well, I did have two boyfriends which was racy at the time,’ she told an interviewer. ‘We were all very young. It was all chop and change. Quite a lot of things were experimental.’

Rampling, a colonel’s daughter, was always known to be close to both Bryan Southcombe, her agent and publicist, and model Randall Laurence. But she doggedly ducked the question as to just how close.

Asked now why she failed to address the truth over the years she replied: ‘You still had parents who were quite conventional and you needed to protect them and I didn’t want people in the golf club thinking… you have to keep up appearances, don’t you?’

Photographs from the time show a carefree Rampling happily posing with both men.

When she became pregnant with her son Barnaby, now a successful film-maker, she chose to marry Southcombe. Pictures from their wedding day in 1972 show New Zealand-born Laurence looking on approvingly from the car.

Asked why she chose Southcombe, Rampling told The Guardian: ‘Who knows what life has to offer you? But sometimes choices have to be made and I chose Bryan because I got pregnant.

‘And you will say, “How do you know it was his?” I won’t go any further. But I chose Bryan and Bryan is Barnaby’s father.’