Charles Bronson serenaded his new fiancée with a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way, moments after asking her to be his wife.
Bronson asked former Coronation Street actress Paula Williamson to marry him on Valentine’s Day during a phone call from HMP Wakefield, where he is serving a life sentence.
It will be the third marriage for the 64-year-old. Keen artist Bronson, who also uses the surname Salvador in homage to his favourite painter Dali, divorced his wife of five years Irene, in 1977. He then married Fatema Saira Rehman in 2001. The marriage lasted four years.
Williamson was filmed accepting the phone call on Tuesday. Bronson can be heard instructing her to open a package he had delivered to her, containing a diamond engagement ring.
She told The Mirror: “We’re soulmates and I can’t wait to be Mrs Salvador – Charlie already calls me his missus and I’m proud to be his.”
The couple have been an item for four months and though any intimacy between them is closely monitored, the newspaper refers to Williamson’s “ritual” of seductively eating the banana from Bronson’s daily food rations “for his viewing pleasure.”
Bronson was jailed for seven years in 1974 for armed robbery but has been locked up for much of the time since then following a string of violent incidents including assault, hostage-taking and damage.
His supporters insist he is a changed man, having undergone therapy behind bars.
Bronson, whose real name is Michael Gordon Peterson, was jailed for life in 1999 for taking a prison art teacher hostage for two days.
A judge ordered him to serve a minimum of four years but he has been regularly been refused parole and was kept in an isolation cell at HMP Wakefield known at the Hannibal cage.
Williamson appeared in Coronation Street three times between 2008 and 2012 as a nurse and has also performed in Hollyoaks and Emmerdale.
Prison inmates can apply to get married or have civil partnerships via a request form to the governor, who will decide if the ceremony should happen in prison or at a register office nearby.