Fairbanks Jnr, Hollywood royalty and knight of the realm, dies at 90

Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, the swashbuckling film star and diehard Anglophile who threw lavish parties and hobnobbed with royalty, died in New York yesterday aged 90.

Perhaps best known in this country for his 1960s television drama series Douglas Fairbanks Jr Presents, which was made in England, he also enjoyed a long and illustrious career in Hollywood, featuring in dashing leading roles in such films as the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda and Sinbad The Sailor.

Bearing the same name as his equally dashing father, a legend of the silent screen and one of the pioneers of the early days of Hollywood, he struggled all his life - successfully, for the most part - to make his own mark.

Fairbanks was one of the first Hollywood movie brats, enjoying all the privileges and suffering all the dysfunctionality that that entailed.

His father, by his own admission, showed no more parental interest "than a tiger in the jungle for his cub", and after his parents' divorce in 1918 he was brought up by his mother, Anna Beth Sully. Fairbanks said that his father, who went on to marry the silent-film goddess Mary Pickford, was undemonstrative and never remembered birthdays or Christmas. Nevertheless, at the age of 13 the younger Fairbanks made his screen debut in the film Stephen Steps Out. He worked throughout his teens, mostly in bit parts, and made his first big splash when, at the age of 19, he married Joan Crawford.

Having used the family name to break into the film business, he won plaudits for his character part in the landmark gangster movie Little Caesar in 1931 and kept up a prolific output - some 75 films in all - right up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

His love of England stemmed from his wartime experience as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy. He participated in several joint Anglo-American operations, and became the first American to command a flotilla of British raiding craft on the Murmansk run, serving directly under Lord Mountbatten.

After the war, King George VI awarded him a knighthood for "further Anglo-American amity", and he spent manyyears in England during the 1950s and 1960s. He was friendly with the Royal Family, entertaining the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret until dawn at his London home for his daughter Daphne's coming out party in 1957. Last night a Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were extremely sorry to hear of his death.

Securing an invitation to the house Fairbanks shared with his second wife, the supermarket heiress Mary Lee Hartford, was described by one newspaper columnist as being "a hundred times more difficult that getting a ticket for the coronation". Later, having retired from the entertainment business, he returned to the United States, settling first in Palm Beach, Florida, and then returning to New York, the city of his birth.

Acting and socialising aside, in 1941 his political connections led to an appointment from President Franklin Roosevelt as special envoy to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Panama. Later, his business interests included land development and the sale of ball point pens. He also wrote two volumes of memoirs.

"I've led an enormously lucky life,'' he said in 1989. "I've done what I wanted to do."