Improbable, unrepeatable: the Jane Goodall I knew

When you tell people you're a journalist, they often ask who the best person you've ever interviewed is - and until I met the ethologist Dame Jane Goodall last year, I didn't know how to answer that.

- RICHARD GODWIN

There are people who are skyscrapingly famous or impressively eminent - but the encounter feels routine, prosaic. Then there are the times you extract amazing revelations from people no one's ever heard of.

Goodall, who died aged 91 in California while on a speaking tour this week, was different. She has been commemorated in magazines, documentaries, a forthcoming biopic, scientific papers, Lego sets, as Barbie dolls and garlanded with honours. She is both a genuine scientific pioneer (in 1960, she became the first person to document chimpanzees making and using tools in the wild, for example), but unlike most scientists, has lived an improbable, glamorous, adventurous, rich, full, unrepeatable life.

I didn't know if I would get close to any of this when I met her. You can forgive a 90-year-old for wanting to be anywhere other than a London photo studio, submitting to questions she'd already answered hundreds of times. In fact, within a minute, she was gently nuzzling me, to show how we would greet one another if we were chimpanzees: "I'm the female, you're the big male and I'm a little bit nervous of you. So, I come up with a submissive akh akh akh! ...And you're completely quiet but you gently pat my head. That reassures me."

We then talked for