With David Niven, was the sherry glass half full or half empty? The question might seem baffling of a Hollywood star for 50 years, a bestselling author, a war hero, adored by millions, a man whose notches in the bedpost included Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Merle Oberon, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth and at least one member of the Royal Family.
Yet the nagging suspicion remains that he could have been a bigger star and a better behaved man.
Because for every great film role, there were five, six, maybe ten turkeys, in which David Niven essentially played himself, and sometimes not particularly well.
The autobiographies were bestsellers, but weren't they ever so slightly made up? He was a war-time commando, but did he kill any Nazis or was he kept safely behind the lines? And all those women, did sleeping with them really make him happy? Apparently yes.
He was born in London on March 1st 1910, to a wealthy family.
His father died attacking a Turkish trench at Gallipoli and his maternal grandfather had been killed by the Zulus at Isandlhana, but David wasn't put off from joining the army straight from school.
Six tediously peaceful years later, following a lecture on machine-gun technique, the Major-General asked if there were any questions, and Niven put his hand up: "Could you tell me the time please sir? I have a train to catch.
" He was locked in the guardhouse and left the army soon afterwards.
He arrived in depression-era California, just one of thousands of acting hopefuls.
However, Niven's great advantage was an irresistible charm both on and off the screen.
When asked why he was so cheerful, he said: "Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it's my absolute duty to be chirpy and try to make everyone else happy too.
" His skits and impersonations had been a his school, Stowe, and at Sandhurst, winning him friends like the Prince of Wales.
Connections like that go a long way in Tinseltown, and long before he'd done any serious acting, Niven was hobnobbing with the likes of Ronald Colman and Loretta Young, in a serious relationship with Merle Oberon and under contract with Sam Goldwyn.
Lawrence Olivier starred alongside Niven in Wuthering Heights in 1939: "David was always a lightweight, but I think that was why we probably got on so well, because I was no threat to him and he was no threat to me.
He couldn't have done a stage classic to save his life, but he had enormous charm.
" No great actor, Niven was powerless to avoid being sent to appear in some appalling films, leading one Hollywood reviewer to pen the ditty: "I sometimes think that David Niven, Should not take all the parts he's given".
Anyway, famous actors can get so precious about parts, but as Niven's friend Anthony Quayle explained: "Whether it was the army, or Hollywood, or the women, or his writing, the whole thing was just one big adventure.
He didn't think acting was any kind of art; he thought it was all a great treasure hunt for the girls and the caviare.
" Amongst Niven's 88 films were some classics: The Dawn Patrol, The Way Ahead, A Matter of Life or Death, Separate Tables (for which he won an Oscar) and The Guns of Navarone.
Two of these were made during the happiest time of Niven's life during the war years when he was back in England, newly married to Primula ("Primmie") and a father for the first time.
Niven's Best Man, Michael Trubshawe, said: "She was a radiant girl, and at once she gave David something he had never really had before: a sense of purpose and continuity, as well as a sense of what his life was supposed to be about...
Primmie was England in the 1930s: country cottages and small children and all that gentle, lost world of the upper classes at home.
" Little is known of Niven's war record as, uncharacteristically, he refused to talk about it.
However, between acting he trained as a commando officer in a special forces outfit called Phantom.
Their role was to liaise between the front line and HQ, even if that meant being the first onto the beaches, even going beyond enemy lines.
He never claimed to be brave - "I was apt to lie down and wait until it was all finished, but people were watching, and that made me behave a little less like a coward.
" - but he was involved in the Dieppe raid, D-Day, the final assaults on Germany and the liberation of concentration camps.
At the end of the war he returned with Primmie and their two sons to Hollywood, fresh from the critical success of A Matter of Life and Death.
Within six weeks of arriving, Primmie was dead, falling down a stone staircase in the dark during a game of 'sardines'.
The light disappeared from his life and, many of his friends claim, never really returned.
One avenue for his grief was sex - he became an addict.
"He became a womanizer out of desperation," said his great friend Lauren Bacall: "He told me 'I'm anaesthetizing myself through certain of my anatomy.
'" Perhaps exhausted, less than two years after the death of Primmie, he married in haste, a Swedish model called Hjördis, who made his life a misery for much of the rest of his life as she became overwhelmed by depression and alcoholism.
He starred in years of terrible films.
America had gone off British heroes since the war, and Niven was only useful for light comedy.
He might even have faced bankruptcy if it were not for one of the fantastic strokes of good fortune that so marked his life: he became one of the first Hollywood stars to move into television - ironic for a man who even his best friends regarded as something of a snob.
As he approached his 50s, Niven began to be offered parts as the sad old washed up Major, crumbling away like the British Empire.
However, so good was he in that role that he won an Oscar in 1959 playing a retired Major who touches up young women in the cinema.
A few years later he scored again as a stuffy Englishman with Around the World in 80 Days, and moved to the more favourable tax regime of Switzerland.
His great friend Deborah Kerr said: "He had to keep working, working, working all the time, and I never in all the years I knew him found out why.
Was he really so worried about money or was it an escape from the family?" Though his marriage was a disaster, Niven would never desert his wife, and was rewarded with two adopted daughters who he doted on in later life.
Living in Switzerland and France, hobnobbing with Princess Grace or the writers that he increasingly cultivated, Niven eventually turned to writing and was the first actor to do so successfully.
They were the same stories he had been telling for decades, sometimes with the characters changed to make them more contemporary, and he delighted his readers just as he had the actors and film crews over the decades.
So why the doubt as to his success? Perhaps Niven was so self-deprecating that eventually the cap begins to fit: "I find nothing dynamic or sensational in my character," he told the Sunday Express in 1959, "and that is a pity.
" Concerned that his sons would be bullied in Beverley Hills for their father being such a ham, he told them to say that their daddy knew he was no good, but was enjoying himself very much.
With buddies like Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, Niven could come look a bit fuddy duddy in comparison, but even amongst his British friends like Kenneth More and Noel Coward, he looked lightweight.
Perhaps there just too few films between the plucky but doomed subalterns of Charge of the Light Brigade, and the washed up Majors of Separate Tables, for Niven to get the reputation he deserved as a heroic figure.
These days, in a world of 'tweeting', Niven's brand of anecdotage looks hopelessly self-indulgent, while the idea of squiring young starlets seems tacky to say the least.
But it's when you stumble upon a film like The Way Ahead on a quiet afternoon, and see the beauty of Niven in his prime - 32 years old, superbly fit as a serving commando would be, wearing uniform and moustache better than any Englishman before or since, that you realize what a wonderful gift to us was David Niven, and how much we miss his like today.
"He was a funny man and a brave man and a good man," said Cary Grant of his fellow Hollywood Brit, "and there were never too many of those around here.
"
Yet the nagging suspicion remains that he could have been a bigger star and a better behaved man.
Because for every great film role, there were five, six, maybe ten turkeys, in which David Niven essentially played himself, and sometimes not particularly well.
The autobiographies were bestsellers, but weren't they ever so slightly made up? He was a war-time commando, but did he kill any Nazis or was he kept safely behind the lines? And all those women, did sleeping with them really make him happy? Apparently yes.
He was born in London on March 1st 1910, to a wealthy family.
His father died attacking a Turkish trench at Gallipoli and his maternal grandfather had been killed by the Zulus at Isandlhana, but David wasn't put off from joining the army straight from school.
Six tediously peaceful years later, following a lecture on machine-gun technique, the Major-General asked if there were any questions, and Niven put his hand up: "Could you tell me the time please sir? I have a train to catch.
" He was locked in the guardhouse and left the army soon afterwards.
He arrived in depression-era California, just one of thousands of acting hopefuls.
However, Niven's great advantage was an irresistible charm both on and off the screen.
When asked why he was so cheerful, he said: "Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it's my absolute duty to be chirpy and try to make everyone else happy too.
" His skits and impersonations had been a his school, Stowe, and at Sandhurst, winning him friends like the Prince of Wales.
Connections like that go a long way in Tinseltown, and long before he'd done any serious acting, Niven was hobnobbing with the likes of Ronald Colman and Loretta Young, in a serious relationship with Merle Oberon and under contract with Sam Goldwyn.
Lawrence Olivier starred alongside Niven in Wuthering Heights in 1939: "David was always a lightweight, but I think that was why we probably got on so well, because I was no threat to him and he was no threat to me.
He couldn't have done a stage classic to save his life, but he had enormous charm.
" No great actor, Niven was powerless to avoid being sent to appear in some appalling films, leading one Hollywood reviewer to pen the ditty: "I sometimes think that David Niven, Should not take all the parts he's given".
Anyway, famous actors can get so precious about parts, but as Niven's friend Anthony Quayle explained: "Whether it was the army, or Hollywood, or the women, or his writing, the whole thing was just one big adventure.
He didn't think acting was any kind of art; he thought it was all a great treasure hunt for the girls and the caviare.
" Amongst Niven's 88 films were some classics: The Dawn Patrol, The Way Ahead, A Matter of Life or Death, Separate Tables (for which he won an Oscar) and The Guns of Navarone.
Two of these were made during the happiest time of Niven's life during the war years when he was back in England, newly married to Primula ("Primmie") and a father for the first time.
Niven's Best Man, Michael Trubshawe, said: "She was a radiant girl, and at once she gave David something he had never really had before: a sense of purpose and continuity, as well as a sense of what his life was supposed to be about...
Primmie was England in the 1930s: country cottages and small children and all that gentle, lost world of the upper classes at home.
" Little is known of Niven's war record as, uncharacteristically, he refused to talk about it.
However, between acting he trained as a commando officer in a special forces outfit called Phantom.
Their role was to liaise between the front line and HQ, even if that meant being the first onto the beaches, even going beyond enemy lines.
He never claimed to be brave - "I was apt to lie down and wait until it was all finished, but people were watching, and that made me behave a little less like a coward.
" - but he was involved in the Dieppe raid, D-Day, the final assaults on Germany and the liberation of concentration camps.
At the end of the war he returned with Primmie and their two sons to Hollywood, fresh from the critical success of A Matter of Life and Death.
Within six weeks of arriving, Primmie was dead, falling down a stone staircase in the dark during a game of 'sardines'.
The light disappeared from his life and, many of his friends claim, never really returned.
One avenue for his grief was sex - he became an addict.
"He became a womanizer out of desperation," said his great friend Lauren Bacall: "He told me 'I'm anaesthetizing myself through certain of my anatomy.
'" Perhaps exhausted, less than two years after the death of Primmie, he married in haste, a Swedish model called Hjördis, who made his life a misery for much of the rest of his life as she became overwhelmed by depression and alcoholism.
He starred in years of terrible films.
America had gone off British heroes since the war, and Niven was only useful for light comedy.
He might even have faced bankruptcy if it were not for one of the fantastic strokes of good fortune that so marked his life: he became one of the first Hollywood stars to move into television - ironic for a man who even his best friends regarded as something of a snob.
As he approached his 50s, Niven began to be offered parts as the sad old washed up Major, crumbling away like the British Empire.
However, so good was he in that role that he won an Oscar in 1959 playing a retired Major who touches up young women in the cinema.
A few years later he scored again as a stuffy Englishman with Around the World in 80 Days, and moved to the more favourable tax regime of Switzerland.
His great friend Deborah Kerr said: "He had to keep working, working, working all the time, and I never in all the years I knew him found out why.
Was he really so worried about money or was it an escape from the family?" Though his marriage was a disaster, Niven would never desert his wife, and was rewarded with two adopted daughters who he doted on in later life.
Living in Switzerland and France, hobnobbing with Princess Grace or the writers that he increasingly cultivated, Niven eventually turned to writing and was the first actor to do so successfully.
They were the same stories he had been telling for decades, sometimes with the characters changed to make them more contemporary, and he delighted his readers just as he had the actors and film crews over the decades.
So why the doubt as to his success? Perhaps Niven was so self-deprecating that eventually the cap begins to fit: "I find nothing dynamic or sensational in my character," he told the Sunday Express in 1959, "and that is a pity.
" Concerned that his sons would be bullied in Beverley Hills for their father being such a ham, he told them to say that their daddy knew he was no good, but was enjoying himself very much.
With buddies like Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, Niven could come look a bit fuddy duddy in comparison, but even amongst his British friends like Kenneth More and Noel Coward, he looked lightweight.
Perhaps there just too few films between the plucky but doomed subalterns of Charge of the Light Brigade, and the washed up Majors of Separate Tables, for Niven to get the reputation he deserved as a heroic figure.
These days, in a world of 'tweeting', Niven's brand of anecdotage looks hopelessly self-indulgent, while the idea of squiring young starlets seems tacky to say the least.
But it's when you stumble upon a film like The Way Ahead on a quiet afternoon, and see the beauty of Niven in his prime - 32 years old, superbly fit as a serving commando would be, wearing uniform and moustache better than any Englishman before or since, that you realize what a wonderful gift to us was David Niven, and how much we miss his like today.
"He was a funny man and a brave man and a good man," said Cary Grant of his fellow Hollywood Brit, "and there were never too many of those around here.
"
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