Malcom said: “Stanley would never shoot anything unless there was magic. He’d say to me, ‘Malcom, where’s the magic?” But I had no special ideas for that scene.

“After four days of sitting around, Stanley came up to me and asked, ‘Can you dance?’ ‘Can I dance?’ I replied. I got up and started dancing while singing, ‘I’m singing in the rain’, and started improvising slapping and kicking all in time to the song.

"Stanley started laughing, immediately called New York and bought the rights to Singing in the Rain. It took 10 days to film that sequence, but it really is key to the movie. Its scary, black, and thrilling all at the same time.”

Three years after the release of the movie, Malcom was introduced to Gene Kelly (star and co-director of Singing in the Rain).

Malcom said: “Kelly looked at me, quickly turned away, and walked off. I think he was disgusted. I tried to say, ‘But it was an homage’, but he was gone. I had no intention of decrying what he had produced. The song was euphoric in the movie.

“Gene Kelly doing Singing in the Rain with him stomping on the water, the rain coming down, the umbrella; that was euphoria. As happy as a human has ever been. And that’s why it worked in Stanley’s movie.

"But I can understand why Kelly felt that way. He was a brilliant artist. But I suppose he thought it was a bastardization of his movie, but truly it really meant his work was way more than just being a movie. Something that has survived into the future.”

In 1977, Malcom, to escape from a year of sex and violence on the movie Caligula accepted the lead in Time After Time, a romantic time travel movie.

Filming a scene at the San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency revolving restaurant, Malcom and Mary Steenburgen fell in love. Visiting MGM studios with her, they were walking down the backlot street when Malcom saw an old-fashioned streetlamp that could have been the actual one that Gene Kelly jump on in Singing in the Rain.

Malcom said: “I wanted to impress Mary, so I started singing and jumped on the lamb pole exactly like Gene Kelly did. It fell over with me holding on for dear life. Hitting the ground, Mary laughed, I laughed, and I guess she was impressed enough to marry me.”