LEGENDARY MIRROR WRITER ON THE

A NEW film tells the little-known story of how a fading Hollywood icon fell for a Liverpool lad almost half her age.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, is the tale of veteran star Gloria Grahame’s affair with young actor Peter Turner, who she turned back to in her cancer-stricken last days.

As the title suggests, she finally flew home to the US to die with family in New York in 1981, aged 57.

But what the film – which stars Billy Elliott’s Jamie Bell and four-times Oscar-nominated Annette Bening – doesn’t show is the colourful life Gloria had led in Hollywood earlier.

Her exploits included seducing her teenage stepson and scrawling the names of ex-lovers on bedsheets to enrage one of her four husbands.

The Mirror’s legendary showbiz writer Donald Zec, now 98, was a friend of the Hollywood stars, including Marilyn Monroe and Gloria’s third husband Cy Howard.

With the film opening on Thursday, Donald reveals here what he calls Gloria’s sweetly scandalous life: