There is a tradition in the west of the children of film stars trashing their parents in “brutally honest” autobiographies or memoirs. Perhaps this is retaliation after suffering years of neglect.

The most notorious was Mommie Dearest, about the Hollywood star Joan Crawford, published in 1978 by her adopted daughter Christina who claimed her mother had a string of lovers who had to be addressed as “uncle”, of being subjected to irrational beatings in “night raids”, having her favourite dresses shredded and being forced to eat undercooked steak.

The latest example of the genre comes from 52-year-old artist Alexander “Sacha” Newley, the son of British actress Joan Collins and the late Oscar-winning American actor and songwriter Anthony Newley, who were one of Hollywood’s golden couples in the 1960s.

Anthony was the second of Joan’s five husbands, while he had three other wives.

In his just published memoir, Unaccompanied Minor, Alexander has written about how he and his sister, Tara, now 54, had to grow up in a famous but dysfunctional family with “narcissistic” parents “enslaved” to their careers.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Alexander said his sex-addict father, who had a weakness for underage girls, “depended on the promise of an after-show tryst with a starlet or groupie”.

Alexander said: “He was a paedophile. My father was drawn to youthfulness. He thought innocence was an aphrodisiac. That was his sexual proclivity, and it’s a very dangerous, destructive thing.”

He added that his father had been “honest with my mother about his appetite for young girls”, but his parents’ marriage disintegrated after he had made a film in 1969, Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, about an older man’s sexual hunger for an adolescent girl.

Joan, who has been made a Dame by the Queen, played the scheming Alexis Carrington Colby in the American soap Dynasty in the 1980s but also appeared in two soft porn films, The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), based on novels written by her younger sister, Jackie Collins.

Joan, now 84, said her son was “being extremely naive and not really knowing the meaning of that word (paedophile). Because what Tony admittedly was, he loved young women. Young women of 17, 18, 19 years old, not children by any means. Never in a million years would I be married to somebody like that”.