Colin got a pink rabbit coat for our baby. Then out of the blue he dumped me; For the first time, the writer callously jilted by Colin Farrell offers her portrait of an obsessive romantic compelled to destroy all that he loves.(Features)

Byline: Niamh Walsh

HE IS one of the most famous womanisers in the world, a legendary hell-raiser whose image almost personifies the description of 'devil-maycare'. Women love Colin Farrell for his bad-boy charm, his rough-around-the-edges good looks and, as is always the case, the fact that he remains an unattainable fascination.

Yet for all the women he has dated and then split up from - including two with whom he has children - not one has ever told her story. Not one has ever revealed what it is truly like to be with Farrell.

Until now.

Because last week, little-known writer Emma Forrest, whom Farrell dated for a year, released a memoirs that seems to be nothing less than a thinly veiled account of her own romance with the Castleknock bad boy.

In the book, Your Voice In My Head, she suggests that the actor didn't just woo her: he pursued her around the world, he texted her relentlessly, flew her family out on holiday with them, made endless promises of undying love - then walked out with barely a word.

But if that all sounds like the behaviour of a lovable rogue, then far more shocking is her claim that he repeatedly badgby ered her to have a baby with him, even picking a name for the child and buying it clothes - right up to the moment he dumped her.

Months later, he was having a baby with a co-star.

So damning are the revelations that Forrest has even said she contacted Farrell ahead of publication to warn him about how it might be interpreted by elements of the media.

Yet by the same token, she didn't go so far as to keep quiet.

Instead, she sets out every intimate aspect of the relationship - from the moment they were introduced at a famed Los Angeles hotel. From then on, it seems, Emma Forrest will be holding nothing back.

'At dinner, following a film screening, I am introduced to a man with long flowing hair who is wearing a keffiyeh,' Forrest writes. 'He looks like the world's campest terrorist but he's actually a movie star with a storied reputation, much of it here, at the Chateau Marmont hotel. In the candle-lit garden we sit next to each other and talk and he admits later that every single thing he tells me is intended to translate as "I'm not like you've heard I am". It works.'

The pair's connection did not immediately become physical, she says; instead, Farrell rang and texted Forrest incessantly, asking her to play him favourite songs over the phone. She describes a 'barrage of texts, poems broken up into thirty little pieces'.

She describes him not as attractive but 'softly wounded, like distressed velvet. A touchable sadness'.

Yet for all her poetry, the couple are soon in a sexual relationship which appears to be becoming more serious by the minute. The star, she says, invited her to his film opening four months in advance - insisting that he wanted them to walk the red carpet together. He worried about her, she writes, and was always protective.

'He doesn't like that my front gate doesn't close properly, so, though he is on a film set thousands of kilometres away, he sends builders to build it and make me a bolt lock for my front door,' she writes.

Even that, though, couldn't prepare her for the shock she feels when the actor decides to announce casually during a late-night phone call that he wants to have a baby.

'When I get back from this film, let's have a miniature human, that grows,' Forrest says he told her. She froze in surprise, then suggested a name: Pearl. And Pearl would come to dominate their conversations for the rest of their relationship, though not always in romantic and endearing terms.

'With his hand over my mouth so I can't answer back, he says, "I would rather die than not knock you up",' Forrest writes. According to the picture painted in the memoir, the star - whom she calls 'GH' throughout because he is her Gypsy Husband - was constantly drawing Forrest in more deeply. He sent her presents and love letters from all over the world, she says, from a Kenyan Barbie doll to a T-shirt he had covered in a handwritten love letter. The couple met in New York and he suggested they plan a trip to Istanbul. They laughed about the tabloid rumours that had begun to swirl about their relationship.

'I tell him my sister, having surveyed the internet, has collated the comments into one conclusion: "You are having a fat ugly baby that's using GH to sell books".'

Farrell replied: 'That's only if it's a girl, love. If it's a boy, it's an unwashed anorexic who's using you to boost its intellectual credibility.'

But Forrest dismissed the rumours, instead falling harder and harder for the tortured Irishman - admiring his 'intellect, his kindness, his sensitivity'. He listened tenderly as she told him of her own struggles; her bulimia, suicide attempts and self-mutilating. But she felt that Farrell helped her and they were 'good people together'.

She writes: 'I love him, and for the first time in a relationship, I also like me. Every time he says, "I love you", I answer, "I believe you".'

Farrell, according to Forrest's tale, certainly went to great lengths to bolster her belief in him, going so far as to fly her parents on holiday with the couple and worrying about the impression he would make. But he soon ingratiated himself. Her father, for example, loved the fact that the actor butters his digestive biscuits; her mother loved that he was reading Chekhov. As Farrell won over the family, he continued to discuss babies, telling her: 'The only thing I know for certain is that I want us to be a family.'

The actor brought Forrest to what is clearly an Irish village, though she never names it, while he was filming a new movie. The two were pictured together at Castletownbere, Co. Cork, while he was working on Ondine, starring alongside Polish beauty Alicja Bachleda-Curus: and it seems Farrell continued his obsession with Forrest and their baby while there, repeatedly asking the writer: 'Are you mine?'

He was so absorbed with the idea of Forrest giving birth that he actually began buying the imagined baby presents.

'Leaving our hotel for dinner, we happen upon a local arts and crafts store,' she writes. 'Amongst the Aran sweaters and knit handbags is a fluffy pink coat for a baby girl, with attached rabbit's ears at the hood, and a soft flannel carrot sewn into one pocket. It's the cutest thing we've ever seen.' Farrell called it 'Pearl's rabbit coat'.

'He touches the coat. He strokes it. He feels it against his cheek,' she writes. 'He paces back and forth, in and out of the store. We head back towards the hotel. He turns on his heels and goes back into the shop. He comes out with Pearl's coat in a plastic bag.'

The book records how Forrest flew home and he continued his devotion. He booked a trip to see her, she says. 'He texts me from the plane to say he'll be in my arms in a few hours and our life together will begin in earnest.

'Then he turns off his phone and the plane takes off.' And yet hours later, it seems, everything has changed: the Farrell who arrives at her door is not the same lovesick man whom Forrest last saw in the Irish village - or even the same man who texted her so optimistically from the plane.

He turns up shaking, looking horrible. They go upstairs to lie on the bed - and, crying, he tells her that he needs 'space'. She, shocked and dazed, wonders 'where he put Pearl's coat'.

Indeed, by Forrest's account it took a few moments for her to realise that Farrell was ending the relationship. She asked whether he only wanted her to get pregnant because he thought it would keep him from leaving. Farrell admitted that could be true.

'This is what love should be like: what we have,' he told her. 'This is the standard we'll both hold out for when we're next with someone.'

The realisation that her world was falling apart sent Forrest into a tailspin. She locked herself in the bathroom while, outside the door, Farrell begged her not to resort to self-mutilation.

She told him to leave and take the food she'd prepared.

Now the man who had helped her feel whole had sent her back into panic and depression. She slept with a stranger; she began renting videos on Farrell's video card; she emailed him and texted, begging to meet him in person.

'Barrelling towards rock bottom, I reach out to GH, tell him things are not good and I would like to speak face to face,' Forrest writes.

'He does not reply. For two days I roil in shock, knowing that he will. But he doesn't. Finally, an email, cool, saying he's "glad I'm doing well", no mention of what I said.' Forrest considered suicide, even lining up the pills that she would take. But she finally came to a realisation.

'When GH asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.' But the final blow was yet to come. Six months after the couple broke up, a journalist emailed Forrest a photo showing Farrell and his new, heavily pregnant girlfriend - obviously in her second trimester, meaning she became pregnant around the same time that Farrell and Forrest split up. The girl, of course, was his former Ondine co-star Alicja.

She writes. 'I know I'm supposed to cut myself. That's the hotwire.' Instead, she goes for a walk through New York City, takes a ferry - and manages to find some sort of closure.

'I finally get it now,' she writes. 'It's really very simple: That wasn't my baby. That wasn't my husband.' Farrell has yet to respond publicly to the book's claims. And of course, readers must remember that Forrest readily confesses to a deeply troubled past.

Yet this is, after all, a man who tattooed the pet name of his first wife, Millie, on the ring finger of his left hand - despite the fact that the marriage lasted just months. He claimed medical student girlfriend Muireann McDonnell was 'the one', and had sons with both Bachleda and US model Kim Bordenave.

None of these relationships has lasted, however.

So while Emma Forrest may herself be a complex young woman - and possibly one of the most naive on the planet - it seems likely that her account of life with Farrell is the truth. And while his behaviour may add to his allure for some, for most women it can only serve as a warning that this bad boy is exactly as bad as everyone says.

niamh.walsh@mailonsunday.ie

CAPTION(S):

EMOTIONAL: Emma Forrest's memoirs

GYPSY HUSBAND: Emma Forrest with Colin Farrell

MOVED ON: Soon after dumping Emma, Farrell was with Alicja Bachleda, pictured