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Margaret Leighton stars as a novelist who draws inspiration for her characters from the people around her. While working on a romance novel, she bases the sexy central male character upon her chauffeur (Carlo Justini). He can't understand that Margaret's interest in him is purely professional, and assumes that the woman is crazy about him. Everybody in Leighton's "real" life portrays his or her literary counterpart in a film-within-a-film, few more amusingly than the lady's wheelchair-bound husband (Ralph Richardson). Something of a comic precursor to The French Lieutenant's Woman (81), Passionate Stranger was also released as A Novel Affair.