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Peter Sellers – Alexander Walker
..it was to while away the hours in ENSA lodgings, where his father's concert-party was staying, that he submitted his palm to a pretty lrish nurse volunteering to read the lines on it - after all, a palm was as effective a way of bringing boy and girl together as a ukulele!

''We're holding hands already,” he cracked.

“You'll become famous,” was her encouraging opening comment after scrutinizing the lines, mounts and declivities over a cup of tea. “You'll become a household name. “

“Like Oxo beef-cubes or Lux soap flakes, you mean?”

Privately, he confided later, he felt so despondent at this time that the only means he could imagine of becoming a 'household name' was to change his own name to 'EXIT' - then people would find their way to him easily enough.

The girl was continuing her forecast, in a more plausible line of country - the heart-line.

“You'll get married, in fact you'll marry . . . well, I don't know, but I seem to see four wives.”

“Will I live that long?” he remembered saying, jokingly.

“Yes, you'll live a long time. You'll live till you're 75.” She finished with a comforting prophecy: “And you'll die in your bed.”

“As long as it's not in someone else's,” he quipped, and received a flirtatious wrist-slap.

Peter took the forecast lightly. why not? It didn't look to him as if much in the way of fame or even four wives, despite his accelerated rate of marriage proposals, was going to come his way. But later on, in the. years, when he depended on the caveats or placebos of astrologers and mediums of much greater eminence, this unnamed Irish girl's prophecy came to shape his superstitious expectations more and more. In some respects it was amazingly accurate:  in one fatal respect, it was to prove a cruel decoy.