Leave me alone!

If it hadn't been for photographers, Elizabeth Hurley's life would be a very different picture.

Public posing in revealing outfits has contributed far more to her celebrity than her oft-derided acting talents.

But as her son Damian approaches his first birthday, she has suddenly decided to bite the cameras that feed her.

Hurley, 37, now wishes it to be known that she is sick of publicity and wishes those pesky picture-takers would leave her alone. 'I have very little privacy in my life now,' she moans to her sympathetic interviewer, Sir Elton John's boyfriend David Furnish.

'I have moronic photographers outside my house every single day. They follow me everywhere and frighten and intimidate Damian and me.

'That's why I have bought a house in the country. I hope the local farmers attack the paparazzi with their pitchforks if they stalk Damian and me down there.'

She even admits hitting a photographer a few weeks ago. Asked by Furnish if she has any regrets, she says: 'Yes, I wish I'd hit him harder.'

And despite very publicly snogging her new boyfriend Arun Nayar everywhere from London to St Moritz, she insists: 'I'm keeping him all to myself.

'Anyone who comes near me gets hounded and dissected by the media in such a totally unacceptable way that I don't want to fuel any fires.'

Underlining the irony of her new anti-photographer stance, the interview is illustrated by Miss Hurley posing in underwear for the men's magazine GQ.

She also reveals intimate details of her life, claiming she fancies Victoria Beckham and discussing the weeks after Damian's birth, when she went to stay with Furnish and Sir Elton.

'I know you think I did nothing but sob on my bed and sing mournful country songs on the karaoke machine, but I did have fun too,' she says.

The hard-hitting interviewer also manages to extract plugs for a new U.S. TV comedy series, in which she plays an MI6 agent, and the make-up company Estee Lauder which pays most of her wages.

It was after years as a struggling actress that Miss Hurley stole the show from her boyfriend Hugh Grant and all his Four Weddings And A Funeral co-stars by arriving at the premiere in that now infamous Versace safety-pin dress.

Since then she has made dressing to impress an art form. She even adopts the demure look when it suits her - such as the time when Grant was caught with a prostitute, and when Damian's father Steve Bing refused to stand by her.

She and her friends spoke openly to the press about how hurt she had been, painting the American playboy as a monster.

In one famous picture spread she posed with a snake and little else, while her last photoshoot for Vanity Fair featured her sitting astride Sir Elton.

Her last three movies have gone straight to video.