The Ten Most Rakish Man-Eaters Of All Time

Born in Kansas in 1906, Brooks initially forged a movie career as the high-kicking jazz-puss star, polished-vinyl bob and all, of silent era froth such as Love 'Em and Leave 'Em and Rolled Stockings. Brooks was as blissfully nihilistic off-screen as she was on it, going through a couple of short-lived marriages and lovers, including Charlie Chaplin and CBS proprietor William S Paley (not to mention Sapphic dalliances with fellow stars including Greta Garbo). While filming the role for which she is most renown, the euphemistically titled Pandora's Box, she carried on performing a love scene with Austrian co-star Gustav Diessl after the cameras had stopped rolling. Her spirited approach to all things carnal has a dark back-story, though: like many of her characters, she found sleeping with abysmal men exotic and enticing, and seemed impervious to all emotions relating to consequence – something she later put down to an instance of sexual abuse when she was nine. “[My assailant] must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure... For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough – there had to be an element of domination.”

The romance for which Shearer is most famous – that with MGM chief Irving Thalberg – was a professionally expedient one, leading to her roles in movies such as Private Lives, The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Romeo and Juliet. Her final liason – with Martin Arrougé, a ski instructor 12 years her junior - was the longest, lasting 40 years. Her six years of widowhood in between (Thalbert died aged 37) featured conquests including James Stewart, George Raft and a 16-year-old Mickey Rooney (she was 36), and director, producer and screenwriter Monta Bell and Victor Fleming - The Wizard Of Oz director who she worked with on1924 silent romantic drama Empty Hands – also became notches on her proverbial bedpost. If her life was spicy off-screen, Shearer’s smouldering fictional personas – particularly during the Pre-Code era that proved to be her purple patch – were the embodiment of uninhibited passion. It’s safe to say that when she died aged 80, in 1983, few names were left uncrossed on her carnal bucket list.

“I think men are exciting,” the femme fatale star of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Postman Always Rings Twice once said, “and the girl who denies that… is either a lady with no corpuscles or a statue.” Married eight times to seven different husbands, Turner was not so much candid as blusterous when it came to her number of past lovers. Her prolifically polyamorous lifestyle reached a nadir, though, when her daughter stabbed her lover Johnny Stompanato to death in their Beverly Hills home. “A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend - a successful woman is one who can find such a man,” she once quipped, perhaps revealing an ulterior motive for her shenanigans.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Franchot Tone, Phillip Terry and Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele married her; Clark Gable, who co-starred with Crawford in eight movies, supposedly had on/off affair with her for decades; the unknown lovers she engaged with is a figure as allusive as her age. But the freewheeling approach to sex of the Mildred Pierce, The Women and Grand Hotel star is best illustrated by one enviable experience enjoyed by Vincent Sherman. In 1949, casting for The Damned Don’t Cry, the director and Crawford were watching some of her previous work when the latter peeled off and her clothes and consummated her leading role contract there and then in the dark.

As a thumb rule, if elderly people think you’re a sign of the imminent apocalypse, you’ve probably got star factor and sex appeal in spades. So it was with a Brooklyn-born Hollywood siren who, despite being born to a “weedy, creepy, hypersexed loser" of a father and a “manipulative and antimaternal” mother, as her biographer David Stenn put it, did engage with some (healthily) spicy flings. Mantrap director Victor Fleming, Gilbert Roland, Bela Lugosi (allegedly) and a young Gary Cooper were all among the blessed. A rumour in an unauthorised biography that Bow slept with the entire USC football team was untrue, and caused her immense mental strife, as did claims of deviancy by tabloid The Coast Reporter (whose publisher was later jailed for trying to blackmail her).

The 18th century Russian autocrat even managed to get laid by a fictional character 25 years after her death (a round of applause for Lord Byron's Don Juan). Stories abound of Catherine’s prodigious sexual appetite which may be just as fictional as her tryst with Byron’s epic pantsman – one suggests that she had female courtiers sample potential lovers so that she’d only receive the most virile and accomplished; another that she died during a failed attempt at sexual tryst with a horse. What’s undeniably true is that for Catherine, sex was an act of expediency as well as immense pleasure, and it likely would have taken an abacus the size of St Petersburg to keep up with this Machiavellian madam’s conquests.

There’s a danger that a comprehensive list of the men the now-46-year-old supermodel has been rumoured to have dallied with might crash our server, so let’s hand-pick a few - Sheik Mohammad Al-Habtoor, Prince Albert II, Flavio Briatore, Gerard Butler, Eric Clapton, Adam Clayton, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Robert de Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Fiennes, Guy Laliberté, Tommy Lee, Eddie Murphy, Luca Orlandini, Sylvester Stallone, Mike Tyson, Usher, Robbie Williams… Campbell once said, “I never diet. I smoke. I drink now and then. I never work out.” With genuine respect and admiration, we’d contest that last claim.

“In Europe,” Dietrich once remarked, “it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman - we make love with anyone we find attractive.” Another time she asserted: “In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it's a fact.” Given such proclamations against prudishness, it’s surprising that Dietrich remained resolutely married to her first and only husband - German director Rudolf Sieber, who she wed in 1924 – throughout a heyday littered with lesbian affairs (she’d been the toast of the drag balls of 1920s Berlin), as well as flings with Gary Cooper, James Stewart and Frank Sinatra to name just three of her celebrated lovers. In her twilight years she would boast of a long affair with Joseph Kennedy in the 1930s, and claimed to have seduced his son, John F Kennedy, almost 30 years later. Rabidly libidinous? We prefer blissfully unshackled.

Of course, we’ll never know the full, unadulterated story – all we can go on are accounts relayed by ancient historians Tacitus and Suetonius some 70 years after the events, and they were writing in a climate that was inimical towards the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius’s imperial line. But the stories are fruity, to put it mildly: think all-night sex competitions with prostitutes (Messalina won, so it goes, with a score of 25 partners); her working secretly in a brothel under the name of the She-Wolf; her cuckolding Claudius by marrying a young noble called Caius Silius. The unfettered sexual license enjoyed by ancient Romans clearly wasn’t the preserve of the menfolk…

She appeared in 85 films in 38 years. She often lived in four different foster homes for over a year as a child (her father had gone off to help build the Panama Canal two weeks after her mother died in a streetcar accident when she was four). She was Oscar nominated for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). It’s fair to say that Barbara Stanwyck (née Ruby Catherine Stevens) packed several lives’ worth of living into her 83-year stint on the planet – including her accomplishments between the sheets. Initially working in the New York speakeasies’ chorus lines, the woman who would go on to star in Double Indemnity and The Lady Eve went on to have affairs with director Frank Capra and actor Robert Wagner, as well as having flings with men including Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and William Holden. The old “girl of easy virtue” is a sexist cliché, but undeniably apposite in this instance.