Spike Milligan Born 1918 / Irish

He grins: "I was in my cabin on one of the big ocean liners - the Queen Mary, I think - doing a job. There was this knock on the door. So I opened it and there was this girl. 'Fancy a quickie?' she asked. So I said 'yes' and we did. Never met her before or since." As we're on this track I ask him who was his most exciting woman. "The sexiest was named Juliette," he says without hesitation. "I was about 29 and she was in all my shows. And when I was writing I used to have this tiny bedroom above my office in Shepherd's Bush because... sometimes I used to sleep there." He clears his throat. "She was beautiful. It was beautiful. But my greatest love was a woman I met in 1946 in Naples. She was named Maria Antoinetta Pantani, although everyone called her Toni. "I was playing in a jazz trio that was touring through Italy with lots of other entertainers and she was in the Italian Corps de Ballet, which was scheduled to come with us. So we all got in this old charabanc and set off through southern Italy. I couldn't sit next to her as some awful gunner was there, but I managed to bag the seat behind her and she left her hand dangling over the back so that I could hold it. I used to watch her dance every night. She was the one. Capri was our last stop. We swam every morning and we had lunch and lay together in the cool of the afternoon listening to the wash of the sea through the windows." from an interview by Edward Docx © Express Newspapers Ltd

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Little Pippa Bump! Return to Sorrento (3rd class) Knees Lobster Granny On the Ning Nang Nong The Bongaloo

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