“JACK Hylton presents”, ran the wording in the advertisements, “Maurice Chevalier, International Star of Stage and Screen, direct from a triumphal season at the London Hippodrome. Fred Freed at the piano”.

The internationally-renowned, French-born singer and actor spent a fortnight in Scotland in February 1953, appearing at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow then Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum. While in the capital he visited the McEwan’s brewery at Fountainbridge (pictured), and received a presentation box containing a dozen samples.

In Glasgow he addressed a press conference at the Central Hotel. “With a twinkle in his eye and the admission that he doesn’t, nowadays, get as much feminine fan mail as he once did (‘which is as it should be with a fellow of my age!’), Maurice Chevalier made his first public appearance in Scotland today,” Meg Munro reported in the Evening Times. “Mr Chevalier, tall, well-built, and with grey hair showing a little bald spot on the crown of his head, makes no secret of his 65 years - but despite them he still retains the secret of making feminine hearts flutter a little”.

The “famous Chevalier pout” was not in evidence at the press conference, but he did hum a little tune. “I have never sung a Scots song”, he said, “but I have sung one in French to a Scots tune - Sir Harry Lauder’s ‘I Love a Lassie’”. After lunch with Lord Provost Thomas Kerr and the French consul, he said he planned to wander around the city shops. “I want to get a white raincoat”, he asked. “Will I get that in Glasgow?”

The Glasgow Herald was in the audience for that night’s opening show. “With an artistry which can only be compared to Ruth Draper [a noted monologist and recitalist who would die in 1956]”, the review began, “Maurice Chevalier enacted more than a dozen little comedies, burlesques, and satires, with an occasional wistful episode ... One has to put it thus, for to say that he sang more than a dozen numbers would be a complete understatement. Certainly he sings, although his singing voice is unremarkable, but it is as an actor that he excels. Each number is prefaced by the story of what he is going to sing: each story is a consummate piece of acting, in which face, hands and feet are brought into play. A flicker of an eyelid or a turn of a finger conveys a wealth of meaning; and when a voice of many subtle inflections is added to these the result is a performance as satisfying as it is brilliant”.

Chevalier died on January 1, 1972, aged 83. Obituaries described him as “probably the most popular and best‐known entertainer that France has produced this century”. Tributes came from around the world. Actress Leslie Caron, with whom Chevalier starred in the films ‘Gigi’ and ‘Fanny’, said he was “perhaps the last representative of that particular spirit of the turn of the century, that gaiety and optimism that was so charming”.