By Nigel Cope, City Editor, The Independent
Mike McGarvey grabs a promotional poster of the new Tomb Raider computer game from the wall of his bright, modern office. "This is it," he says excitedly pointing at the scantily clad figure of the Lara Croft character flying through the air over the strapline "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness".
Is that the same woman as last time, I enquire? "No. We have to change the model every year. The whole fame thing gets to them and, well..." he says, his voice trailing off. Whatever can he mean?
Mr McGarvey runs Eidos, the computer games publisher behind the Tomb Raider series. Appropriately, he looks like he's just walked out of Hollywood central casting. Aged 36, the casually dressed Californian has the light tan and uniform features of the all-American boy. It comes as no surprise that he played college-standard American football in his youth before giving it up after a tendonitis problem in his throwing arm. "I was a quarterback," he says sitting in his office in Wimbledon, south-west London. "It's the hero or zero position. But I was too small, really. These guys are six feet nine these days."
In a sense, he is in the hero or zero position again. Eidos has been dogged by a catalogue of errors including missed launch dates, profits warnings and fears over a weak roster of games. Incredibly, the so-called "Golden Age of Gaming", which has seen the Microsoft X-Box and the Nintendo Gamecube being launched into a market already bubbling with the Sony PlayStation2, seems to have passed Eidos by. Its shares are bumping along close to their all-time lows. Things have got so bad that investors must sometimes fear they would one day see the headline "Eidos: GAME OVER" flashing on their screens.

One day,painter Lucian Freud was reading the style magazine Dazed and Confused, edited at the time by Kate Moss's boyfriend, Jefferson Hack - in itself a slightly unexpected thing for such a senior artist to be doing - when he discovered an interview with the model. In this, she revealed that one of her remaining unfulfilled ambitions was to pose for Freud.
This might explain how Kate Moss became the subject of Naked Portrait 2002 - on which he was reportedly at work the night others were at a black-tie dinner in his honour at Tate Britain. She is perhaps the most famous person he has ever portrayed, with the exception of the Queen (and there may be sections of society in which the model is better known than the monarch).
Moss was also quoted as saying that although the painter was 80 years old, he was still very cool; which was quite right, except that he was only in his mid-seventies at the time (he turns 80 this December). From Freud's point of view, Moss was an unexpected choice of subject, because he has often said that the last thing he wants is a professional model. He wants to paint a real person, not a practised holder of poses. And there can scarcely be a more practised and professional model in the world than Kate Moss (unless it's the Queen, who must have posed for more portraits than anyone else alive).
But such a sitter perhaps presents a particular challenge: to discover a different person from the one who has been seen so often by the camera lens.
As reported today in the British press, the Freud painting certainly portrays an unfamiliar image of the supermodel. She is, as Freud often prefers with his subjects, completely naked. Her waif-like figure has been plumped up by pregnancy to almost Rubenesque rotundity (Freud tackled her midriff first so as to fix its form before it expanded further). She is seen, reclining on a bed, in steep recession so that her shins are the most prominent feature of her anatomy (which seldom happens in fashion shots).
The Kate Moss painting will be exposed in December at the Tate Britain Museum in London.
Update: Cathy points out that Moss isn't the first pregnant supermodel that Lucien Freud has portrayed, as this Jerry Hall 1997 proves. She notes: "Perhaps Freud would be better to adhere to his "ordinary people only" rule as he doesn't seem to have captured the spirit of either woman, when so many of his other images - although harsh, yes - have some charm".