The look is Dusty Springfield with a towering blond beehive and seven pairs of false eyelashes stuck to the upper lids. The music pays witty homage to Noël Coward and other showbusiness greats in the lyrics and the spirit of 70s cabaret in its yearning torch-song melodies. Miss Hope Springs, a 6ft 2in "ex-Las Vegas showgirl", is the retro-glam, vaudevillian alter ego created by the pianist Ty Jeffries in order to sing his own compositions in theatres and clubs around the country. Although he comes from a performing background, with the occasional foray into drag over the last decade, he never did anything quite as flamboyant and fully realised as his ambitious trilogy of Miss Hope Springs shows while his father was alive.
Away from Hope's gowns and wigs, Ty (a family nickname, short for Timothy) will look strangely familiar to many film fans. Although he has his mother's blue Irish eyes, in every other respect he's the bald-headed, lantern-jawed, moustachioed image of his late father: the character actor Lionel Jeffries, who also directed the classic 1970 film The Railway Children.
Hope Springs, Ty's first original dramatic creation, was inspired by the memories of old black-and-white films he and his father watched together on television on Saturday afternoons, along with Ty's own experience of Hollywood when the family moved from Beaconsfield to Beverly Hills after Lionel got a role in the 1967 film Camelot. They socialised with everyone from Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson to Fred Astaire – who taught the six-year-old Ty to tap-dance down Sunset Boulevard.
Eventually the family – Lionel, his wife Eileen, Ty and his two sisters – returned to Britain, where they settled in Buckinghamshire. "My father did his very best not to repeat in our upbringing the childhood he had had, which was a nightmarish one. The beatings from his father, as well as the mental abuse, haunted him all his life, so he tried his very best to be a much more loving father to us," says Ty.
Lionel had discovered a talent for acting during the second world war when, as a young captain in Burma, he enjoyed getting involved in concert parties. After the war he enrolled at drama school – Rada – defying his parents, strict Salvation Army majors who regarded showbusiness as sinful.
His experience found an echo in E Nesbit's novel The Railway Children, which he adapted for the screen and directed. The project was a poignant labour of love into which Lionel poured his longing for the happy childhood he had never had.
The Jeffries household, though Roman Catholic, was a liberal one, in which gay showbusiness friends were welcomed. So it is perhaps surprising that Ty, who describes himself as having been born gay, never discussed his sexuality with his parents. He first came out to friends in New York in the late 1970s, after moving there "to start my own life and follow my dream" in his early 20s. He became a model, working for Jean Paul Gaultier and Comme des Garçons. "That was when the big love affairs of my life happened," says Ty, who didn't see his family for four or five years.
Although his family came to understand that he was gay, Ty says that he never brought male partners home to meet his parents. "Maybe I never thought any relationship was serious enough," he says. "If I had, I think my parents would have been absolutely fine about it; there would have been no conflict. But I've always kept my private life private. I'm very independent and do my own thing, and my sexuality wasn't something we ever sat down and talked about, even though I've known all my life that I am gay.
"I had girlfriends in my teens and fell in love with some of them, but I always knew what I was as a person. Dad was born in 1926, a very different world, and ours wasn't a buddy-buddy relationship because he just didn't come from that sort of background. In the sense that all parents want their children settled and happy, of course they would have liked me to marry. But I just didn't talk to my parents in a confiding way about such things."
Lionel died two years ago at the age of 83 after suffering from vascular dementia for 12 years. Ty launched Miss Hope Springs three months later. "I created her world to transport people back to a softer, more gentle era. Dad always encouraged my songwriting, and if he had been around today, I'm sure he would have loved her as much as my mother does."
Lionel himself once played in drag. When Ty told his father a few years ago that he was playing a Joan Crawford-style drag queen in a one-man show that proved to be the prototype for Miss Hope Springs, Lionel dug out pictures of himself in drag for his role in Blue Murder at St Trinians. "He looked just like his mother when he dressed up, which was possibly not as glamorous as me looking like my mother when I do it," says Ty.
A classically trained pianist, Ty has adroitly avoided the well-known curse of the famous father's son and carved out his own distinctive path. In the 1980s, he came back to England to concentrate on songwriting. He was signed to Elton John's Rocket Music. "The weight of my father's acting career was too much to compete with, so I sidestepped it in a way that was completely true to what I wanted to do. But everything I've done is connected to performance."
A single, seemingly solitary man who says he loves his own company, Ty has never known the kind of long-term support from a partner that his mother gave his father "although I'd like to have staff to look after me when I get older", he says. Yet he says life never gets lonely. "How many people would love to have the luxury of not having to consider anybody else? I don't have the time or the energy for a relationship because I work every day."
Having concentrated on live one-man shows so far because "they are so simple to put on", he hopes to direct movies, like his father, and already has a completed screenplay with a producer. "Dad lives on, I guess, through me. I just hope I have even a small amount of his success."