For more than forty years, Niven portrayed on screen the impeccable values of a lost breed of English gentlemen - handsome, beautifully spoken, elegantly dressed, witty, with perfect manners and utterly charming. Niv, according to his friends, was much the same off-screen. Both men and women were enchanted by his charisma, humour and joie-de-vivre. Yet Niv's life was punctuated by tragedy. From the death of his father when Niven was five, to his mother's neglect and the stepfather he loathed, through to the death of his beloved first wife and his volatile and disturbing second marriage, unhappiness was never far away. Using new material from Niven's private papers, Graham Lord has written a fresh, revealing, funny and poignant portrait of a brave and brilliant man.**