Douglas Fairbanks jnr, the swashbuckling actor, author, businessman and war hero, died in New York yesterday, aged 90.
Born in New York in 1909, he followed his father Douglas Fairbanks into the movies when they were still silent.
In the age of talkies he was one of the first - and arguably the best - swashbucklers, starring as Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and the title role in Sinbad the Sailor (1947).
He married actress Joan Crawford at the age of 19, only to divorce after four years when he learnt of her affair with fellow screen idol Clark Gable.
He had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Gertrude Lawrence.
Six years later he married his second wife, Mary Hartford, the former wife of a grocery millionare. During the second World War, he once commanded a British landing party and served under Lord Mountbatten. King George VI awarded him an honorary knighthood for the "furthering of Anglo-American unity".
In 1951, Fairbanks moved to a house in South Kensington, London. Scandal surfaced in 1963 when he was named in the Profumo trial as having been introduced to call girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.
He was also named 12 years ago as the "headless man" who featured in compromising photographs used in the divorce case of the then Duchess of Argyll in 1963.
Fairbanks sold his London home in 1976 and spent most of his time in New York and Palm Beach, Florida. He made his last movie, Ghost Story, in 1981.