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When Neile Adams takes to the stage in an intimate jazz club in London to perform her one-woman cabaret show, The Lives of Me, this week, there will be one life in particular with which the audience will be fascinated.

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Though she grew up in the Philippines, where she and her mother were held for three years in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War, and later achieved success on Broadway in Kismet and The Pajama Game, it is her 16-year marriage to the inimitable Steve McQueen that continues to captivate. During that time, the couple negotiated the considerable highs and lows of his rapid Hollywood rise, a narrow escape from the Manson murders and numerous infidelities. Not to mention her own sole indiscretion, which ended with him holding a gun to her head.

It’s small surprise that even some 37 years after his death, Adams admits: “I still think about him every day. He always pops into my dreams. Sometimes they’re happy dreams, sometimes not.”

Now 84, yet still possessing the svelte dancer’s physique that first charmed McQueen, Adams has “very happy memories of England”. She recalls: “Steve was there shooting a movie called The War Lover (in 1961) and we were staying at Lord and Lady Russell’s house in Belgravia. Aside from the weather, those were great days.”