When we arrive at Jim Kempton's place, the first thing we notice is that he has Shirley Maclaine's head on a peg in his kitchen. "I've done Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and now Shirley," he said cheerily. "I seem to be having a run on Hollywood women."

Before we go any further, it might be as well to point out that Shirley's noggin is made of clay, as Jim Kempton is a chief waxwork sculptor with Madame Tussaud's.

Occasionally, he works from the neat terraced house in Oxford he shares with his wife Sophie and their children Milly, Joe and Imogen.

A large skylight allows clear northern light to pour into the corner of the kitchen where his work bench is set up. He's only been working on Shirley for a few days, but she's already clearly recognisable.

Jim began sculpting as a schoolboy, making small animal figures, but a car crash in which he lost the end of an index figure when he was 16 drained him of motivation. He was looking for gardening work one day in Oxford when he chanced to walk down the drive of the sculptor Oscar Nemon, who created the famous figure of Sir Winston Churchill which graces the House of Commons. "Oscar encouraged me," Jim recalled. "I started doing his garden but gradually spent more and more time with him in his studio. I showed him some of the little animals I had made and he thought there was something there."

A place on the enterprise allowance scheme led to a commission from the Sultan of Brunei and work for Mohamed Al Fayed, doing window sculptures for Harrods and then, in 1990, to doing a test for Tussaud's.

"There were about six or seven other sculptors there," he recalled. "It was quite nerve-racking."

He got the job, though, and aged just 33, he's already sculpted a considerable gallery of the famous and celebrated, including Diana, Princess of Wales, Chris Evans and the Dalai Lama.

"You can soon tell if you've got it right," he explained. "You need to catch the essence of a person early on, get the right proportions and expressions. A sitting will usually last for about two hours and we'll take hundreds and hundreds of photos of the subject to get as three-dimensional a picture as possible.

"Diana was really fantastic. We went to Kensington Palace for the sitting and she was witty, relaxed and generous. She walked around in her bare feet and offered us tea and chatted about her boys. When we started taking the photographs, she told us it was the first time that she'd smiled at a camera for ages. She was very fluid in movement, very natural." It can take up to six months to finish a figure, with the head alone requiring up to 200 separate measurements. And the end result will be a completely accurate depiction of how the subject actually looks - there's no flattery or pandering to any showbiz vanities.

"Famous people's biographies always lie about their height," laughed Jim. "Then when you come to meet them, you realise that they're not so tall after all!

"I think everyone is pleased to be asked to be included in Madame Tussaud's. We'll do a new figure if the person involved changes a lot - I've just done an update of Kylie Minogue. Getting the smile right is always difficult - everyone is so different. It's got to look natural and relaxed, bright and fresh - we don't want them to look as if they've got a cardboard smile.

"If you can watch people talk, it can knock days off the time it takes to do their head. So far, everyone I've done has been pleased with the result. Keith Floyd even brought his mum along to see his finished sculpture."

The process of creating a waxwork is a highly-skilled, time consuming affair. The body is actually made of glass fibre and the head and hands wax. Human hair is used, with the end of the eye of a needle chopped off to make a tiny fork to push in each individual hair.

As the sculptor, Jim watches over the entire process, from start to finish. "We work to strict schedules," he explained. "There's a fair bit of pressure on us and we have to make sure that the quality of the work never suffers."

His recent creations include sports pundit and crisp king Gary Lineker and he may be working on Kate Winslet next.

After he's finished with Shirley, of course.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.