She was regarded as Britain’s answer to Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, leading a glamorous and sometimes scandalous life in Italy and the US. This weekend Belinda Lee, who died in a car crash in California in 1961 aged 25, is being celebrated in her home town, the rather less glitzy Devon seaside resort of Budleigh Salterton.
Lee, the daughter of a hotel owner and florist, left the town – dismissed in a Noël Coward play as a place of potted palms with a damp golf course – in search of fame and fortune. She found it in London, continental Europe and Hollywood but was also saddled with a degree of notoriety over events in her private life, such as having relationship with a married aristocrat.
