IT’S not every day I had the chance to have lunch with Raquel Welch in Southampton, but almost 40 years ago she was staying at the former Polygon Hotel.

When Raquel appeared at the restaurant table she, was every bit as glamorous as her Hollywood sex symbol image. The only drawback was she was just 4in tall.

The man sitting opposite me was the late Ray Harryhausen, who died earlier this week at the age of 92, and he carried the perfect miniature Raquel about in his sports jacket pocket.

Oscar-winning Ray, who was the cinema’s greatest exponent of special visual effects, was in Southampton in 1974 to lecture to members of the city’s film theatre on the art of animation.

A gentle, kind man, Ray, whose wife Diana came from Winchester, never showed any sign of an inflated ego, so often the calling card of those working in the Hollywood film industry.

Ray’s name might only have appeared on film credits, but to those who knew and appreciated his remarkable talents, he was truly a star.

He created a brand of stop-motion model animation which became known as Dynamation.

“It could take three hours to make a character take one step,” said Ray.

“Sometimes I didn’t have much patience with people, but my models always did exactly what I wanted them to do.”

After lunch Ray introduced me to some of his other creations, including a six-headed snake, a sword-brandishing skeleton, and a mythical sea goddess.

These were the tools of Ray’s trade and were the magical ingredients of films such as It Came from Beneath the Sea, One Million Years BC and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, together with Jason and the Argonauts, which featured a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.

He also famously created the monster Medusa, with her hideous face and venomous snakes instead of hair in Clash of the Titans.

Ray said: “When my daughter Vanessa, was a child she used to push the model of a dinosaur from the film The Valley of Gwangi around in her baby buggy.

“But when her mum took her to Harrods one day, two old ladies pulled back the cover in the buggy and were horrified. They got furious with my wife and told her to get the child a proper doll.”

Ray’s influence on today’s filmmakers was enormous, with luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park citing him as the man whose work inspired their own creations.

Peter Lord, who brought Wallace and Grommit to the screen, said, Ray was “a one-man industry and a one-man genre”.

Shaun of the Dead director, Edgar Wright was quoted as saying: “I loved every single frame of Ray Harryhausen’s work. He was the man who made me believe in monsters.”

Ray traced his enthusiasm for animation back to the time he was a young boy.

“I suppose you could say it was a 50ft gorilla which led me to my career,” Ray, who had lived in London since 1960, told me. Just after the first King Kong was released in the States I went and saw it at the Chinese Theatre in New York. It just enthralled me completely.

“I was so impressed with the visual effects used in the movie, I knew this was the sort of work I wanted to do.”

After making 16 feature films and many shorts, being involved in the script, design, direction and production as well as special effects, Ray gave up film-making in 1982.

His Academy Award for technical achievement, received in 1992, once stood inconspicuously on top of a cupboard among photo frames.

Ray once said: “Today’s cinema is terribly depressing. All films are looking in the garbage can of life.

“Directors have lost sight of the fact that the cinema is there to give you entertainment, to take you out of yourself.

“This is what I have tried to do in all the films I was ever connected with.”