Alice and Ellen Kessler, singing and dancing twins who worked with Sinatra, Astaire and Belafonte

They were particularly popular in Italy, where they settled in 1962 and earned the nickname “legs of the nation”. In 1976, aged 40, they featured in Italian Playboy, their cover issue becoming the magazine’s fastest-selling issue.

Although they were once described as “man’s dream made flesh”, the Kessler twins resisted the advances of admirers. They never married and remained virtually inseparable from the day they were born until the day they died in an assisted suicide, which has been legal in Germany since 2019.

Alice and Ellen Kessler were born on August 20 1936 in the town of Nerchau, in the German state of Saxony, to Paul Kessler, a mechanical engineer, and his wife Elsa. By some accounts Paul Kessler was a violent drunk and the twins had a difficult childhood, their father’s irascibility welding the sisters together.