Along with his apparent fluency in dozens of languages, ‘including various Balkan dialects’, how much of this can be believed? The next thing we know is that Justice is appearing in Ealing and Disney films, accepting roles turned down by Peter Ustinov and Robert Morley, British cinema’s other character-elephants. He was Petty Officer Evans, Scott of the Antarctic’s colleague, Little John to Richard Todd’s diminutive Robin Hood, Henry VIII, with Glynis Johns, and a lecherous Edward, Prince of Wales, in Mayerling. As the factory owner, Lord Scrumptious, in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he tells Dick Van Dyke, ‘You had your chance and you muffed it !’ Justice also turned up in a couple of sand-and-sandals epics with Gregory Peck. ‘He was comfortable in the Biblical costumes,’ we are told, ‘being, as he was, a fond wearer of the kilt.’ He played Sir Lancelot Spratt on seven occasions.

Justice lived in a Hampshire mill house with its own weir. His only child drowned at the age of four, after which he separated from his wife and became quite a womaniser. Bardot was fond of him and he had an affair with Molly Parkin. He took her to the Ivy and he had ‘his fingers in my Marks and Spencer knickers all through the meal’, Molly has testified. He was often cited in divorce suits. In 1975, the year of his death, he finally married his long-term mistress, Irina Von Meyendorff, a Prussian princess described as ‘Zsa Zsa Gabor but with greater intelligence’.

The couple had settled on the Dornach Firth. Justice’s weight ballooned to 19 stone and the bottom of his car fell out as he was driving along. He suffered a stroke, started to babble in Danish, couldn’t get work, and was declared bankrupt. He and Irina were taken in by the heir to the Russell and Bromley shoe-shop chain — a man whom Irina married after Justice’s death. His ashes are interred under a cairn on Birichen Moor, in the Highlands. 

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