On Monday, a raunchy letter from Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich – a surreal fantasy about her, reflecting what he called an "unsynchronised passion" that endured for more than 25 years – is part of an online auction of Dietrich's possessions. Although their relationship remained platonic, many other authors did have movie-star lovers …
F Scott Fitzgerald – Lois Moran
Fitzgerald's affair in the 1920s with this Zelda lookalike, a silent screen actor who was 17 when he first met her, infuriated his wife – she once threw a jewellery gift from him out of a train window while raging about Moran – but inspired Dick Diver's romance with the actor Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night.
Siegfried Sassoon – Ivor Novello
The war poet's relationship with Novello – now remembered mostly as a songwriter, but also an actor then fast becoming British cinema's No 1 leading man – began badly when Sassoon (who hated Novello's hit song Keep the Home Fires Burning) cut him dead; they nevertheless had an affair lasting a few months.
Erich Maria Remarque – Paulette Goddard
The German-born author of All Quiet on the Western Front emigrated to the US in 1939. Far from inactive on the west coast boudoir front, he bedded Dietrich and Greta Garbo (separately, although the two goddesses may have been long-term lovers) before marrying Goddard, Charlie Chaplin's ex and the star of his Modern Times.
Camus relieved the intolerable Sisyphean absurdity of man's condition with many affairs, including one with the star (in the dual role of Death and a princess) of Jean Cocteau's 1949 film Orphée, which also featured Cocteau's own lover, Jean Marais, in the title role.
A Hollywood star best known for movies such as Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany's, Neal was married to Dahl from 1953-83, and was herself played by Glenda Jackson (with Dirk Bogarde oddly cast as Dahl) in a biopic centring on her recovery from a stroke.
Arthur Miller – Marilyn Monroe
The most famous of all romances of this type, their short-lived marriage was unusual as a splicing of playwright and global celebrity: other dramatists have contented themselves with flings with leading ladies, or married stage or TV actors (eg Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard), not celluloid idols.
Jackie Collins – Marlon Brando
Before writing Hollywood Wives and other bonkbusters, Collins has said, she met Brando when she was only 15 at a party in LA, and they had "a brief but fabulous affair – he was at the height of his fame and glamour".
Reviews of the Irish novelist's recent autobiography complained that it contained "a lot of kissing but not much telling", but it does tell us about a one-night-stand with Mitchum, the droopy-lidded lead in Night of the Hunter, Ryan's Daughter and Farewell My Lovely.
In Bed with Gore Vidal, Tim Teeman's recent book, suggests that among those who shared his bed were Rock Hudson, Noël Coward and Charles Laughton, and less predictably Astaire and Paul Newman.
The critic and creator of Oh! Calcutta! had a bizarre love affair in the 70s – later depicted in a screenplay by his wife and biographer Kathleen Tynan – with the then-elderly Brooks, who 50 years before had starred in Pandora's Box and started an enduring vogue for bobbed hair like her "black helmet".
