Norman Bowler played an early television hero of mine, the detective Harry Hawkins in Softly Softly: Taskforce. He later surprised me by turning up as Frank Tate, the star of the relaunched ITV soap Emmerdale.
But back in the Fifties he was a member of the hard-drinking Soho set - you can see him remembering those years in an interview clip about the painter John Minton.
This photograph shows her with his first wife Henrietta Moraes. They are standing in front of a painting of Bowler by Minton.
Henrietta was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme with Maggi Hambling, and you can read her Independent obituary from 1999.
It all makes the Soho of those days sound a thoroughly miserable place.
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