This week’s heroine is: Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968).

Our heroine’s social scene: 1920s London, and 1950s New York.

Famous for: A film and stage actress, and later a radio and TV personality, Tallulah was renowned for her controversial behaviour, including overindulging in drink and drugs and taking her clothes off at every opportunity.

In 2000 she was at the centre of a posthumous scandal when declassified MI5 papers were released, revealing she had been investigated for corrupting Eton schoolboys during the 1920s.

Infamous for: An Alabama belle, Tallulah was sent to convent school before moving to New York aged sixteen to make a name for herself on the stage. She loved animals, and had numerous dogs, a parrot named Gaylord, and a lion named Winston Churchill.

Whilst performing in plays on London’s West End, she bought a Bentley, but found driving in London so confusing that she usually resorted to hiring black cabs to drive to her destination so she could follow behind them.

Reason she’s a heroine: Although she did not identify as lesbian or bisexual, Tallulah had numerous sexual and romantic relationships with women, and spoke about them unashamedly to friends, colleagues and the media (one of her most infamous quips was “my father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine”).

She became a role model for armies of young women (she called them ‘gallery girls’ because of their regular attendance at her West End shows), and the newspapers reported her flings with both men and women, meaning a more mainstream reportage and discussion of sexuality than had previously been acceptable in traditional media.

Any famous friends or lovers: Numerous men and women, reportedly including Chico Marx, Betty Carstairs, Marlene Dietrich, Mercedes de Acosta and Greta Garbo.

If she were alive today she’d be: on the cover of Heat magazine every week.