Locke Sings a Different Tune : * Film: The 75-year-old Irish tenor, whose life inspired the movie ‘Hear My Song,’ mends his fences in Great Britain.

LONDON — The rehabilitation of Josef Locke, the Irish tenor whose tempestuous life forms the subject of the current movie “Hear My Song,” is complete.

Locke lived in enforced exile from Britain for several years because he owed substantial sums in back taxes. But he was the guest of honor at a royal premiere of the film in London Tuesday night, attended by Princess Diana.

After the movie was screened, director Peter Chelsom introduced Locke to the audience, which gave him a standing ovation. He then sang “Danny Boy” directly to the watching princess.

Finally, another indication that Locke has mended fences in Britain--while on stage, the news was broken to him that he was to be the subject of British TV’s version of “This Is Your Life.” He was immediately whisked away from the premiere to tape the show at a London TV studio.

On Wednesday, Locke, who was one of the biggest performing names in Britain in the 1950s, reflected on the events of the previous evening--and the movie that has once again brought him to prominence.

“I still haven’t seen the film all the way through,” he said in his hotel room. “But what I saw, I liked. Before the film ended, I had to go and do some voice exercises before I sang for the princess.”

At 75, Josef Locke still stands an imposing 6-foot-1 in his sturdy brown boots. He underwent heart surgery five years ago, and shows a visitor his scar. He is more quietly spoken now than in his rabble-rousing heyday, when women and alcohol were significant factors in the Locke legend.

He agreed he “might have been disappointed” that Vernon Midgley’s voice was chosen to sing on the film’s soundtrack for Ned Beatty, the American actor who portrayed him, but his comments were more measured than earlier utterances on the subject before the film premiere.

His original enthusiasm for the film, he recalls, was scant. “I told Peter (Chelsom) and Adrian Dunbar (the film’s co-writer and lead actor), ‘You must be bloody mad to think of making a film about me,’ ” he said.

Still they persisted. Chelsom showed up at concerts in Ireland that Locke occasionally gives when the mood takes him. “They followed me around for two years, and they finally tracked me down to a bar in Spain, and in the end I gave my permission,” he said.

“But here was an understanding that certain parts of my life would not be dealt with. And it was honored. I thought Ned Beatty portrayed me wonderfully, even if he is quite a bit smaller than me.”

In “Hear My Song,” Dunbar plays a young English club owner whose girlfriend’s mother (Shirley Anne Field) had an affair with Locke 30 years previously, when she was a beauty queen. He books into his club a “Mr. X,” who looks and sings like Locke, but he is exposed as a fraud when he clumsily attempts to seduce Field’s character, and Dunbar begins an odyssey to Ireland, where the real Locke was living in exile, to persuade him to sing at the club, and regain the affections of his girlfriend.

Locke agrees that though the story is a shaggy-dog fantasy, certain elements are true. He did evade the clutches of the British police to escape to Ireland. There was a beauty queen in his life at that time, and there was a “Mr. X” who made a living imitating Locke in clubs throughout England.

“I saw him on a talent show on TV once called ‘Opportunity Knocks,’ ” recalled Locke. “I think he was a former truck driver. And they billed him as ‘Mr. X--Is he or isn’t he?’ He certainly didn’t fool everybody. I didn’t think he was much of a singer, but the fact he made a living off me didn’t bother me. It was flattering, in a way.”

At his peak, Locke topped the bill at summer seasons in Blackpool, the English coastal resort, earning the then-phenomenal sum of 2,000 ($3,500) a week. Peter Sellers and Julie Andrews were two of the young names he hired as support acts. Locke was drafted for the famed Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli at London’s Albert Hall. But tenors like Locke were being driven from popularity by the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, and in some ways his flight from Britain, in 1958, was timely.

His enforced exile lasted almost nine years. When he returned, the Beatles had transformed popular entertainment, but Locke still earned enough money from concerts to pay off his 17,000 tax bill at the rate of 750 a week.

He now lives in a quiet Irish village in remote County Kildare with his second wife, Carmel, to whom he has been married 21 years. The couple also have a house in Spain.

What does he do? “I don’t do anything,” growls Locke irascibly. “I drink three pints of Guinness every afternoon and do my crossword. That’s what I do. At my age, I don’t feel like doing much.”

He dresses eccentrically, in a white Stetson hat with a leopard-skin band, an ascot worn loosely outside a checkered shirt and garish tartan pants. The effect is completed by silver-rimmed sunglasses and his goatee beard.

Locke played the United States in his prime and well remembers a residency at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. “Nelson Eddy was in the next casino,” he mused. “The audiences were very noisy, I found, compared to those in Britain. Of course, the drinks were free, so they drank a lot, but a I told people at the time, audiences didn’t stay quiet for Frank Sinatra, so what bloody chance had I got?”

While Locke is pleased for Chelsom and Dunbar because of the success of “Hear My Song,” he insists it is their success rather than his. “It doesn’t matter what happens with the film,” he said. “It’s not going to change the way I live one bit.”

* “Hear My Song” is playing at the AMC Orange Mall in Orange, the Edwards Rancho Niguel 8 in Laguna Niguel, Edwards Town Center in Costa Mesa, the Edwards Westminster Mall Cinema in Westminster and the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar.