Anthony Steel - one of Britain's most popular screen actors in the 1950s seemed to have it all - that was until he met and fell in love with the Swedish diva Anita Ekberg. From then on his career nose-dived into oblivion. This is Anthony Steel's amazing life story, the good times and the bad.

Beginning and ending in the recent past, the story is set partly in London and Poland in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Elizabeth, the grand-daughter of a Scottish engineer working in London during the First World War meets Peter, a blind man and fellow law student at Oxford; they marry. Her parents' marriage is very difficult and her life as an only child with a mother incapable of loving anyone and a father who confides in his daughter about his serial infidelities will, in later life, trigger her manic depression. Elizabeth begins a career in academic law whilst her husband...