HER audience at Glasgow’s Alhambra Theatre, when she walked onto the stage that night, was receptive but uncommitted. Eighty minutes later, however, they stood as one to give her an ovation, and threw adoring flowers at her feet.

Another audience had fallen under the spell of Marlene Dietrich.

Dietrich had arrived at Glasgow Airport in the morning of Monday, November 7, 1966, to be greeted by seven-year-old Iain Robertson, whose father was assistant manager at the theatre, and be presented with a tartan doll.

On the Alhambra stage, she sang everything from The Blue Angel to Pete Seeger, “and on the way she was sad and happy and funny by turn, and made us feel sad and happy and funny along with her,” observed this paper’s critic. “Perhaps her sad songs are the best. There is more feeling, certainly, when she sings of the follies of love and war; and that was when she reduced her listeners to complete silence, a rare feat in a Glasgow theatre.” And of course there were the old favourites – Falling in Love Again, See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have – all sung in those distinctive swooping tones.