Terence Blue knew quite a lot about sex however. At drama school, freed at last from his dour Welsh Chapel upbringing, he had quite simply overwhelmed not only the girls in his class but every girl in the building and some of the tutors as well. He purchased condoms from a barber’s shop and kept on practising. Molly McKenzie and Frances Kitson and Pauline O’Brien and Emmy Lou Brown and Izzy Fields all had some of their early – sometimes incredibly innocent – sexual experiences with Terence Blue. By the time they graduated Juliet Lyall had fallen wildly in love with him after a night in the Drama Academy theatre, when he kissed her on the empty stage and held her in his, by now very experienced, arms.

When people saw Terence Blue’s piercing blue eyes they assumed he’d changed his name in order to draw attention to them, but Blue was his real name, he came from a long long line of Welshmen whose eyes had been unforgettable, just as a family of good suitmakers became Taylor. Casting directors and producers saw at once that he had something special: he played leads in films as soon as he left drama school. It may have been true, as many of his contemporaries ascertained, that he couldn’t act on stage but he seemed to know instinctively how to act in front of a camera. He didn’t ever play small parts but, unlike Nicky Abbott’s film Heartbreak, Terence’s first films were not of memorable quality. Several of them, English horror movies, were extremely forgettable. Or so it seemed: later the horror films became cult films and to his surprise Terence – although by then extremely famous anyway – also became a cult hero in his fifties.

Terence Blue and Juliet Lyall got engaged soon after the class of ’59 graduated. Sex was still an area of ignorance and fear and unwanted pregnancies; supervised contraception was only available to married couples. Crossing her fingers and relying on condoms Juliet threw herself into sex with Terence as though it had only just been invented. She loved him to distraction: she only had to catch sight of his blue eyes and she went, literally, weak at the knees; for the first time in her life of betrayed mothers and stepmothers and mistresses she was happy. She and Terence didn’t actually live together, already they were working in different parts of the country. But they met whenever they could, made love continually, anywhere they could find the privacy. Her eyes sparkled with new knowledge and with love. She knew they made a stunning couple – saw them becoming a famous English institution in the theatre: Dame Juliet Lyall and Sir Terence Blue, she rolled the names around her tongue.