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public. It is easy to attack children, they are small and depend on you.’

Nina’s death in 2003, aged 70, unleashed family resentments and a battle in courts across America over her multi-million-pound estate.

‘Ugly truths have come out and relationships have died because people treated me as a commodity,’ Lisa tells me.

‘Too many people had ulterior motives.’

Throughout her life Lisa, a professional singer and musician, was dragged across the world by her mother.

When she complained or refused, she was blackmailed and beaten. It is a mark of her erratic and peripatetic life that she had 13 governesses by the age of seven, was working at ten and was her mother’s chauffeur by 12. She walked out at 14 after a beating.

Nina refused to support her career in the U.S. Air Force or her entry into music, and disinherited Lisa from her will.

‘I’d like to think if she had taken two seconds to think about her behavior she would have done things differently but I’m not sure.

‘My mother was angry with the world and often the only person around to blame was me.

‘When my parents were together my mother was more giving and open but with the divorce she turned into someone you didn’t want to know.

‘I had nothing to do with my father before his death.’

That father, Andy Stroud, who Nina married in 1961, died in 2012.

A former detective, he was a muscular, handsome but a violent

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