The actor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who died on May 7th aged 90, carried his father's name proudly, although he had to overcome paternal neglect and comparison with one of Hollywood's legendary stars. An attractive and competent actor, he managed to carve out a satisfactory career for himself in films, and to become a prominent personality in other fields.
Despite having all the advantages of a Hollywood kid, his childhood and adolescence were not propitious. Because there could be only one Douglas Fairbanks, his father and mother, Anna Beth Sully, a Rhode Island heiress, referred to their child as "the boy". His Irish nurse pronounced it "bye", and from then on he was called "Bye" by his family and friends.
His father, always insecure despite his stardom, later confessed that he had "no more paternal feelings than a tiger in the jungle with his cub". His mother, on the other hand, tried to give him double helpings of love. He was brought up by her from the age of nine when his parents divorced.
He sculpted and painted from early youth, exhibiting at 13, and made his screen debut at the same age in Stephen Steps Out. When he told his father that he wanted to become an actor rather than go to Harvard, Douglas Fairbanks Sr threatened to disown his son, and to cut him out of his will.
Without his father's financial assistance, he accepted bit parts and wrote titles for silent films. Gradually, he started to get juvenile leads, notably in Stella Dallas (1925). In 1928, he played in A Woman of Affairs with Greta Garbo. In 1929, he married up-and-coming star Joan Crawford. They appeared together as a married couple in Women Love Diamonds, but were divorced four years later.
From 1930 to 1935, he was in great demand, playing, as he remarked, "big roles in little pictures, and little roles in big pictures." The big pictures included Howard Hawks's The Dawn Patrol, and Little Caesar, when he was Edward G. Robinson's driver with ambitions to gangsterhood. The smaller pictures included the screwball comedy Love is a Racket, and the boxing melodrama The Life of Jimmy Dolan.
In England in 1934 he played the Grand Duke Peter opposite Elisabeth Bergner in Catherine the Great for Alexander Korda. In 1935 he was living beyond his means, and immersed in an affair with Gertrude Lawrence with whom he starred in the film Mimi. However, he managed to raise enough capital to set up his own English-based company, Criterion Productions. The Amateur Gentle- man (1936) - the first and best of three pictures for Criterion, was set in Regency times. But the picture didn't do as well at the box-office as was hoped, and Criterion struggled on with two more lame productions.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich, who used to smuggle him into her hotel room at Claridge's, when he met socialite Mary Lee Epling at a party given by Merle Oberon. His wild oats sown, he married her in 1939, a marriage that lasted until her death in 1988.
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, he had made a splendid Rupert of Henzau, the soldier-swordsman in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). A number of good parts followed, in which he was able to put on his pukka accent and a pith-helmet in British colonial adventures.
In Gunga Din (1939) he was the gentleman soldier at the side of rough Victor McLaglen and cheeky Cary Grant, a devil-maycare trio fighting a murderous sect of religious fanatics in India. In the same year that his father died, aged 56, Douglas Fairbanks Jr made a conscious decision to emulate his celebrated swashbuckling style.
He took the title roles in The Corsican Brothers (1941). After the second World War he gave an acrobatic performance as Sinbad the Sailor (1947). In The Fighting O'Flynn (1949), he portrayed a kind of Irish musketeer, scaling walls and leaping across roofs with reckless abandon.
During the war, as a lieutenant commander in the US navy, he had taken part in several combined Anglo-American operations (recalled in his memoirs, A Hell of a War) and in 1949 he was made an honorary knight of the British Empire for "furthering Anglo-American amity."
Other honours he received were the Legion d'honneur and Knight Grand Officer of King George I of Greece.
During the 1960s, he introduced and sometimes acted in a British TV drama series Douglas Fairbanks Presents, from which he made a lot of money to add to the fortune gained from the manufacture of popcorn and from his other varied business interests, and from the rights to his father's films.
In 1973 he moved to Palm Beach, Florida. Soon after, he returned to the stage in My Fair Lady in Los Angeles and San Francisco; The Secretary Bird in Chicago; and Present Laughter in Washington.
In 1976, having rehearsed and played in Cork Opera House, he appeared at the Phoenix Theatre in London in The Pleasure of his Company in a role that could have been written for him - that of a rich, witty and urbane globetrotter. This was followed by a two-week run at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.
He married again in 1991, at the age of 81. Two years later, he was named as the mysterious headless man in a photo used in the Duchess of Argyle divorce case of 1963. He always denied that it was he, although the duchess was a close friend.
He is survived by his wife, Vera Shelton, and three daughters from his second marriage, Daphne, Victoria and Melissa.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr: born 1909; died May, 2000