The house was an unpretentious rented property in North London. It was about two in the morning on a still summer night in 1962.

In the bedroom, television's new Simon Templar in The Saint - the hero with a halo - lay asleep in bed with the Italian mistress for whom he had recently left his wife.

Suddenly the silence, and their slumber, was shattered by the sound of breaking glass, as a brick smashed through the bay window in the living room.

As a saintly hand reached for the telephone to call the police, a steel stiletto heel stamped its way violently through the glass front-door.

It belonged to a glamorous 47-year-old blonde, only 5ft 2in tall, who had driven straight from a West End nightclub where she was starring in cabaret.

By the time the police arrived, she was back at the broken window and trying to climb through, her elegant beige cocktail dress, pink suede shoes and expensive mink stole liberally flecked with blood.

"You're just in time, Sarge," she told one of the three officers.

"Give me a leg up. I'm going to kill an Italian!"

As the police dragged her away, the smashed front door was thrown open, and the estranged husband of the feisty Welsh singing star Dorothy Squires stood there surveying her in silence.

Tearing herself free of the police, Squires hurled herself at the man she had loved and lost, pulled up his sweater, and wiped her blood on his chest.

"Here's my blood!" she screamed. "Take it! You've taken everything else".

Glaring at the woman of whom a celebrated columnist once wrote: "When stirred, she is a fiend from the pit, spitting hot lava", her husband yelled back: "Take her to the nearest nut-house and put her in a straitjacket!" And with that, he slammed the door.

This is just one of many episodes in his haunting and traumatic second marriage that Sir Roger Moore, knight of the realm, UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and the screen's erstwhile 007 in seven James Bond movies, has tried to expunge from his memory.

Tomorrow he celebrates his 80th birthday in Los Angeles where, this week, he has been honoured with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame - appropriately enough, outside 7007 Hollywood Boulevard.

Standing beside him was his Swedish-born fourth consort, Christina Tholstrup, who, to those with observant eyes, bears an uncanny resemblance to his second wife, Dorothy Squires, the passionate, temperamental and explosive woman who was arguably the love of his life, even though at times that love turned into a nightmare of hatred and acrimony.

For Moore, known to his friends as a gentle, easy-going, peace-loving man, had an extraordinary capacity for bringing out the virago in his three former wives.

Each one of them resented his infidelity, and the fact that he left them without a word of warning or explanation. Moore was the classic male "bolter".

Roger George Moore, the son of a London policeman, was born in Stockwell, South London, and went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the age of 17.

There were those who, on account of his baby-faced looks, and the fact that his RADA fees were funded by the notorious homosexual film director Brian Desmond Hurst, suspected that young Roger might be gay.

He was anything but. He had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and the first object of his affection was a fellow RADA student, the actress and ice skater Doorn Van Steyn, whose real name was Lucy Woodard, the daughter of a Streatham taxi driver.

She was six years his senior, and already once divorced, but they married on December 9, 1946, when Moore was a 19-year-old 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps. The marriage was a short-lived disaster, largely due to lack of money.

After he was demobbed, Moore earned a mere pittance as a film extra and knitwear model, and their home was one room in the Streatham house that Doorn shared with her parents, brother, two sisters and brother-in-law.

Moore was later to describe Doorn as "a stunningly beautiful girl", and he even learned to ice-skate in order to be near her.

But she told him: "You'll never be an actor. Your face is too weak. Your jaw's too big, and your mouth's too small".

"All we did was row about it," he recalled later. On one occasion, she emptied a pot of tea over his head.

On another, he found that she had dumped all his clothes in the bath, with the tap running.

While Moore was understudying David Tomlinson in The Little Hut, he emerged one evening from the stage door of the Lyric Theatre, and found Doorn waiting to confront him. "She bit me," he recalled. "She bit me on the hand.

"Mind you, my hand may have been raised to strike her, but I let out one almighty yell, which added to the mirth of David Tomlinson and fellow actor Robert Morley, who seemed to react to this black domestic comedy with schoolboy glee".

In 1952, Moore received a chance invitation to a party at the Bexley mansion of Dorothy Squires, then one of Britain's top singers and recording stars.

Squires, who was then 37 - 13 years Moore's senior - had been born in the back of a travelling van parked in a field at Pontyberem, Carmarthenshire.

Her parents sold fish and vegetables from the van throughout Wales.

She had begun life working in a local tinplate factory for about £2 a week, and when Moore met her, she still had the scars on her arms that she got doing that first job.

She had come to fame through her partnership, both on- stage and off, with the bandleader Billy Reid, who was 13 years her senior, ironically the same age difference as between herself and Moore.

When Reid abandoned his wife and two small daughters in 1938 to live with Squires, his family were left homeless and virtually destitute.

Reid composed a series of lush and highly dramatic song hits specially for Squires - Coming Home, The Gypsy, I'll Close My Eyes, Mother's Day and A Tree In The Meadow - all of which went into the charts and turned Squires into Britain's most popular female vocalist, earning £350 a week, which was a gigantic salary in the mid-Forties.

But their relationship was based on heavy drinking, appalling language and what the comedienne Beryl Reid (no relation) was to describe as "most wonderful rows with broken chairs and flying records - something I'd never witnessed before in my life".

Reid was pathologically jealous. Squires claimed that he used to put ladders up to her bedroom window to check that she was alone in bed.

After one shouting match and punch-up too many, Squires left Reid in January 1951, and their partnership was dissolved.

Into the vacuum created by this split walked the young and unknown Roger Moore, then earning about £8 a week.

 

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