Jagger was the ugliest man I’d ever seen!

TO THE generation who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, Patti Boulaye was the strikingly beautiful actress and singer who appeared in the musical Hair, took starring roles in The Black Mikado and Carmen Jones and won the ITV talent show New Faces in 1978.

More recently she has become known for her charity work in Africa and the UK (for which she was awarded the OBE in 2016), for leading 5,000 gospel singers down the Mall during the Queen’s 2002 Golden Jubilee celebrations and for her appearance in the BBC1 series The Real Marigold Hotel.

Her route to fame was a hard one. Her mother was the daughter of a Nigerian tribal king who was murdered, leaving his family in poverty. Her father was a postmaster.

Patti, their seventh child, was born as the marriage was falling apart. The couple’s divorce had a savage impact on their children, who were torn between their parents.

Returning from a visit to her father just before the Biafran war, Patti and her sister witnessed the murder of a pregnant woman and a baby by troops and were lucky to survive.

In 1970, as the war ended, Patti was 16 and thinking about her future. Her parents wanted her to study law, which so appalled her she considered becoming a nun. But a visit to her sister Grace, who was studying in England, changed the course of her life.

Patti (left) took singing lessons during her stay. One day, she joined a queue she thought was for Madame Tussauds. In fact, it was for auditions for the musical Hair. She sang The Hills Are Alive from The Sound Of Music and was hired.

However, Hair proved not to be all peace and love. She was unimpressed by the boyfriend of her fellow cast member, Marsha Hunt. When Mick Jagger turned up at the theatre, Patti exclaimed: ‘That is the ugliest white man I have ever seen!’ She refused to join in the nudity in the final number and was pained by the spliff-smoking actors. They, in turn, ‘didn’t approve of my conservatism and lack of sympathy for their lifestyles’.

Accusations of conservatism would trouble her decades later when she expressed her support for John Major: ‘I made many enemies in the entertainment industry for being photographed at Conservative events.’

But despite the criticism, her career prospered, and so did her love life. Her future husband, the entrepreneur Stephen Komlosy, proposed within two hours of their first meeting, ignoring the detail that he was married with three daughters.

Patti, who had thought she was unable to have children, became pregnant and ‘after a lot of heartache on all sides, we were married and he turned out to be my soul mate’.

Patti writes with great energy, and while her book would have benefited from tighter editing, there is much to enjoy in this outspoken account of a courageous journey from poverty to celebrity.