A Scots film star, born in a Glasgow tenement, who found fame on the silver screen, has been discovered all over again by a new generation of fans. Bebe Brun needed police protection to keep crowds of fans at bay when she visited her native city, when she became a screen goddess. This time her visit has been more dignified, but she still found many admirers among her fellow Scots, even seventy years on from her first appearances on screen.

Bebe Brun was born Martha Law in a simple Glasgow tenement in 1901, but found fame after getting her big break working with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock on London After Midnight. She also doubled as the legs of femme fatale Marlene Dietrich, so effectively that Brun’s shapely pins were insured for an enormous sum for the duration of the filming.

This week, she has been gracing the screen in Scotland once again, after the British Film Institute made a new print of one of her films, Weekend Wives, screened at Glasgow Film Theatre. In keeping with the period, the film was accompanied throughout by a pianist.

Bebe Brun had started out as a stunt woman. On location in Tilbury docks, Hitchcock needed someone to leap between two ships. He offered £50 — an enormous sum in those days- but no-one was apparently brave enough to take up the offer. Brun said she would do it for £100. She got the cash and she caught pneumonia, but her career took off.

Her looks, in that period, were considered stunning and led her to work with screen legends like Randolph Scott, Lupino Lane and Will Hay. Marlene Dieitrich was reportedly furious with Bebe Brun though. While filming the epic Blue Angel with Dietrich, director Hitchcock decided Dietrich’s legs were just not good enough for what the film needed, but he thought his old friend Bebe Brun’s legs were. Dietrich was still the star of the movie, but it was Brun’s shapely pins that earned the "million dollar leg" tag, after Hitchcock had them insured for two million dollars.

Her nephew Richard Coyle, introduced the screening, explaining that in her day Bebe Brun "was a star in the way that Madonna is now. She was stunningly beautiful, the first Scottish silver screen goddess and an amazing woman."

Bebe Brun’s screen career was brought to a premature end after a fun fair accident, but she married a wealthy diplomat and lived her on husband’s Sussex estate until the age of 83.