Juliet’s father, a film producer and a friend of Laurence Olivier, had promised his daughter that he was working on getting her a wonderful lead in a new film that he was involved with which would be made in a few months’ time. It was called The Red Dress and he had already let her see the unfinished script. He assured her it would make her a star.

So when, in the summer of 1961, Terence Blue made his fiancée Juliet Lyall pregnant by mistake, she had an illegal abortion.

The abortion was as messy as – she knew from conversations with other actresses – such things almost always were: a back room near Victoria Station and a shifty man with some chloroform and some extremely alarming-looking sharp instruments, and she blamed Terence because although he paid the £250 required for the abortion – an enormous sum, most of the money he made on his first film – he seemed upset about it, said he would like a child, didn’t see that the pregnancy would have ruined her career. (But he certainly wouldn’t for a moment, she thought, have wanted it to interfere with his.)

She went back, pale and exhausted and bleeding, after having the abortion on a Sunday morning, to the repertory company in York where she was in a new play every two weeks. Harry Donaldson was also in the company and felt sorry for her as everyone else in the company did but it was a common occurrence among actresses, after all. Everybody knew this, that all over the country actresses who’d been caught walked about as best they could – the show must go on of course – having paid a large amount of money to be operated on in secret rooms; bleeding for weeks, for months; afraid to go to a doctor because what they had done was against the law.

So Juliet Lyall made the audience laugh with her performance of Elvira in Blithe Spirit in the evening, rehearsed the part of Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest during the day, used up packets and packets of sanitary towels, had long tearful phone calls with Terence Blue who was filming at Shepperton, told him she hated him, told him she wanted them to get married, waited for her father to change her life.

And then Terence Blue, who went one night to a performance of A Doll’s House in the West End with an older actress with whom he had begun a somewhat steamy affair while Juliet was in York, fell in love with Nicola Abbott.