"I myself would have been curious to meet the person I was to interpret," says the heavily accented, slightly indignant voice at the end of the telephone line. "Kim Basinger has given her own interpretation of me, and it's definitely not me. I was never afraid when Paolo went off hunting. I've certainly never been afraid of the elephants in my garden."
Kuki Gallmann, widow, mother, internationally acclaimed author and conservationist, is not very happy. I Dreamed of Africa, the film adaptation of her autobiography, opens today in the US and she is quickly discovering the pitfalls of handing over your life to Hollywood.
"I know, times change and things change. But this is a year 2000 depiction of my life in the 1970s," she says.
It is easy to understand why Hollywood was attracted to Gallmann's life, despite her initial (and, apparently, unresolved) reluctance to see "all that drama up on screen". Born just outside of Venice in 1943, Kuki (her name is pronounced "cookie") moved to Kenya with her husband Paolo and son Emanuele in 1972. They bought a ranch in the Laikipia region and revelled in their new, exotic life. Shark fishing, buffalo hunting and flying around the continent in private planes became part of their daily life, a far cry from the claustrophobic grey gloom of a Venetian winter.
But eight years later, Paolo was killed in a car crash on his way to pick up a cradle for his and Kuki's soon-to-be-born daughter, Sveva. Three years later Emanuele, then aged 17, died in Kuki's arms after he was bitten by one of his pet snakes.
At this point, most people would probably have packed up and gone home, leaving with nothing but sad memories of their African adventure. Gallmann, however, stayed put. Determined "to make something positive out of the tragedy", in 1983 she established the Gallmann Memorial Foundation - in memory of her husband and son - dedicated to conservation and anti-poaching programmes, research into the use of the region's medicinal plants and promotion and sponsorship of the education of Kenyans.
When she is not working at the foundation in Kenya, she flies around the world, raising international aid for it. It took her agent and myself almost a week to track her down, chasing her by telephone and email from New York to Toronto to London to Kenya.
In the three parts of her autobiography - I Dreamed of Africa, African Nights and Night of the Lions - Gallmann manages to write about her life and achievements without slipping into sanctimonious smugness or overwrought sentimentality. She describes Africa without romanticising it or resorting to scenes of alien quaintness - this isn't Out of Africa meets A Year in Provence. And although she didn't learn English until she was an adult (self-taught from Victorian novels "about governesses and paupers") her books are beautifully, elegantly written, enlivened with wonderful details of her life in Africa: the smell of elephants, the sound of a leopard's cough, the feel of the desert dust after the rain.
Although Gallmann stresses that her main aim in writing the books (and giving her consent to the film) was to present a side of Africa not often seen on television, she admits that there was, inevitably, a cathartic aspect as well: "Some people - I've never done it - go to a psychoanalyst, lie on a couch and tell a stranger their problems. That's what happens, isn't it? Well, since I was a little girl, the white page has been my psychoanalysis."
Through her books she looks "for clues for solving the absurd puzzle"; trying to find a logical progression leading up to her senseless losses.
I Dreamed of Africa is punctuated by terrible tragedies - crippling car accidents, the death of friends and friends' children. It is as if Gallmann, in retrospect, sees her life as a series of disasters, preparing her (and the reader) for her greatest tragedy - the loss of her husband and son.
Take romance, loss, rejuvenation and a clear plot, chuck in some stunning vistas and a sweeping soundtrack, plus a politically correct eco-message: hey presto, you have Hollywood magic. Or so thought the 15 or so producers who approached Gallmann as soon as her first book was published. Initially, she was unwilling to hand over her life into "unknown hands", but in the end she signed away the rights to her book to Stanley R Jaffe, already a producer of two films that deal with a lone female struggling against the odds - The Accused and Fatal Attraction.
Although Gallmann enthuses about Jaffe and the director Hugh Hudson (who made Chariots of Fire), she had her doubts. She questioned why most of the film was shot outside of Kenya, and felt there was a "lack of magic" on screen between Basinger and Vincent Perez, who plays Paolo. She feels happier after having seen the movie at the New York premiere last week ("Not a dry eye in the house!"), but still has her reservations. "It is difficult to concentrate a life down to two hours. The film is a rendition of the book, and the book is a rendition of my life, so I knew it would not be the same."
But Gallmann's main concern was Basinger. Despite Basinger's praise for Gallmann as "an individual with dreams and the fortitude to pursue them", the actress seems to have decided to treat Kuki Gallmann as a fictional character: not once, to Gallmann's chagrin, did Basinger arrange to meet her character's real-life counterpart. "The director, the producers and the scriptwriter all spent time with me in Laikipia. The only person who didn't come was Kim. Perhaps she felt a little insecure, and she had her own ideas about her interpretation of me.
"You know," she hastily adds, "I'm not an actor, I don't know anything about actors. The only time I see movies is when I'm on an airplane, so I don't know how actors approach these things. Kim is good with the script she was given. But, you know, we're very different people: she's an actress in the US, I live in the bush."
So what about the film itself? "Well, I'm not really the ideal audience. The ideal audience member has never met me, never been to Africa, never read my books. For that person, they will be hit by the film, no doubt about that."
But now that Gallmann is back home in Laikipia, she has more important things on her mind: she is finishing off two more books, there's the day-to-day running of her 100,000 acre ranch, not to mention preparations for the wedding of Sveva, now 20 and studying at Oxford. But it is her charitable foundation that remains Gallmann's primary concern. Just before we hang up she asks me: "Have you been to Kenya yet?"