AGEING actor Michael Caine says he wouldn't want to have a love scene with a woman who looked like him. Well, thank the Lord for that. Two of them on the one screen would, indeed, be one too many - and she might just steal the show. But seriously, instead of mooning over the much-vaunted return of romance to the big screen, we should be asking ourselves whether watching the fumbling of sixtysomething man with extremely young woman is what really constitutes convincing dramatic action worth a fiver a go - or whether it is the result of laziness and

apathy on the part of all concerned.

They may have legendary role models like du Maurier's Max de Winter, or Bronte's Rochester, but it seems an anachronism that after virtually a century of popular cinema older leading men like Caine, Sean Connery, and Jack Nicholson - all of whom have, or are about to, seduce, in film, girls young enough to be their daughters - still retain the upper hand when it comes to casting, and, indeed, that contemporary audiences allow themselves to be so moved by the oldest trick in the book.

The celluloid dream machine, fed by legend and literature, has always turned on the dramatic age-gap stereotype. However, with talented, beautiful actresses like Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone, and Kathleen

Turner now well into their forties and increasingly unemployed, and the likes of Jodie Foster and Kristin Scott Thomas in their late thirties, you can't help wondering when we are all going to get real and demand the kind of storylines that make older male actors fall in love with them. Surely to goodness it isn't happening just because it would look too normal?

Real passion springs from the intensity that is borne of all kinds of extreme. Age difference is possibly the easiest visual metaphor for passion, but to portray realistically an attraction of, say, opposite temperaments between leading characters of similar age, as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor managed so well in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is more of a challenge all round. Yet the age-old romantic cliche is being played out time and again. Could this be because after all this time men still want to give the impression of enjoying droit de seigneur?

To imply that an experienced actor has nothing to offer an established actress, and vice versa, is just too depressing and takes us right back to the days of the eighteenth-century Beaumarchais libretto and echoes the doomed master/pupil relationship between the characters played by Sara Miles and Robert Mitchum in Ryan's Daughter. On another level, witness the current on-screen betrothal between wrinkly Mike Baldwin and his ''young vixen'' employee Linda Sykes in Coronation Street.

For some, art may imitate life - for a while. Like Wendy Deng Murdoch and Soon Yi Allen before her, the actress Catherine Zeta Jones now looks sets for a life of glamour with an up-and-coming geriatric - assuming she does make it up the aisle with Michael Douglas. Pre-nuptial agreements notwithstanding, she has joined a growing band of trophy wives who replace the older originals and get to inherit some of her famous new partner's millions. These young women don't even seem to contemplate the worry of his impending paunch or prostate problems; somebody else will presumably look after him - and her - when he's gone gaga. Safe for now in his powerful arms, she gets to bask guilt-free in her youthful beauty while he gets carte blanche to parade his virility.

For ordinary girls with other ambitions, large-age-gap relationships seem much less desirable - despite the startling comment from the TV presenter and commentator Anne Robinson last week that ''the most important thing to most women is having a bloke''. Some gay relationships between men appear to thrive on huge age differences - a friend of mine says he has never been happier than with his current partner, who is 30 years his junior - but research shows that most

heterosexuals, when looking for a life partner, aspire to someone who looks, thinks, or acts like them.

Mutual attraction apparently springs from overlapping similarities in physical attributes, social class, basic value systems, or intelligence. Place this, however, against one psychologist's recent remark that, while women are good at allowing time for a man to demonstrate his other qualities, a man will simply discount a woman as a potential partner if those qualities are not immediately apparent. Or how about this little gem: a man wouldn't marry a woman who was superior or too outstanding in other ways such as personality, status, or career.

When Michael Caine says he has always liked his women young he means on the screen, of course. His real-life partner, Shakira, to whom he is reputedly devoted, is old enough to be his - well, wife. Similarly, Connery's long marriage to Micheline appears happy and stable.

Who is kidding whom? Might Mick

Jagger, recently split from the undeniably accomplished fortysomething Jerry Hall, have something to say on the matter? Sorry: I've just heard he's too busy awaiting the birth of his next wife to come to the phone.