Michael Crawford paints a picture of the young David Hemmings

This blog's hero David Hemmings first made his name as a singer, being the first boy to play Miles in Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

One of the boys he beat to the role was Michael Ingram, who is known to us as Michael Crawford. Later, they were to alternate the role of Sammy in an English Opera Group tour of Britten's Let's Make an Opera.

In his memoirs Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String, Crawford paints a picture of Hemmings in those days:

David Hemmings ... was more precocious, and far more adventurous than I would ever have dreamt of being. When I was fourteen, David was fourteen going on 30! He was always disappearing into the bathroom with his girlfriend: I imagined that they were 'doing it', but I didn't have the faintest idea what 'doing' it entailed. David was a gentleman, never indulging in locker-room confidences. Still, we all knew that whatever it was he and his girl were doing behind the bathroom door, you could bet your life that she'd emerge with a smile on her face.

In fact David would arrive anywhere as if he had just come from doing it. He had a rolling gait like Robert Mitchum's in Build My Gallows High, and had the upturned collar too. His voice was always a little deeper than mine: he sounded as though he'd been smoking from birth. 'I think it's bloody,' he'd say. It was his favourite phrase - he said it about everything. It's difficult to appreciate just how cool that phrase sounded. He was everything I wanted to be. 

Whenever there was a woman around he was there first. And what a dancer! I remember he moved his hips a lot inside his very sharp trousers. David was doing the lambada before anyone ever thought of it. I admired him enormously. Looking back now, I think David was in the process of re-inventing himself - he was standing outside himself, trying on new personalities for size, tongue in cheek all the while.

At the end of the tour I was sent back to Oakfield kicking and screaming all the way. Predictably, I returned to the classroom as David Hemmings, swaggering in, collar turned up. First period of the day: geography. Mr Steele addresses the class. 'The Suez Crisis - what are we to make of it?'

From the back of the class I offer, 'I just think it's bloody'. My classmates turn away, sniggering loudly.

'It's bloody alright', Mr Steele agrees: 'Get out!'

Interestingly, one of Hemmings' obituaries said he seemed to be playing a different role - actor, business tycoon, director - every time you met him.