When it comes to assessing the other actresses who have played Catwoman, the role that she pioneered in the 1960s Batman TV series, Julie Newmar keeps to one simple rule: don’t. “It’s rather sweet and nice to be the first person of many who will play this character,” she says. “It’s like Carmen. How many great sopranos have done Carmen? It’s silly to compare. We’re all wonderful in our differences.”

She has yet to see Zoe Kravitz in The Batman anyway but she doesn’t like the sound of the movie any more than she enjoyed the “morbid, joyless, dissonant dirges” that came before. Why does she think that the default setting for Batman movies is furious gloom?

“God bless them, producers and directors are imitating life at large as they see it,” she says. “They are accurately mirroring society. But you, me, we can live in the world of our making. I call it living above the morass. I don’t listen to the news much anymore. I watch French television because they’re always talking about gardening and food.”

Now 88, Newmar still has the diction and class of old Hollywood, punctuating her answers with a sleek murmur: “Mmm.” She’s at home in Los Angeles, looking out over her magnificent garden. “I think to live safely to the age of 90, you have to make a mental decision to enjoy these sweet days left in your life,” she says. “I’m looking out my window now and I’m looking at paradise.”

Batman, which ran from 1966 to 1968, could never be mistaken for a grim commentary on a society riddled by violence and corruption. It blasted camp and pop art into America’s living rooms when both concepts were relatively new. Newmar was 32, living in New York, and recovering from the cancellation of her robot sitcom My Living Doll when she received a call about joining the show’s first season as Batman’s flirtatious foil.