Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s bodyguard was fired from the SAS for moonlighting when his regiment commander spotted him pictured with them in the pages of Hello! magazine.

Former SAS soldier Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham says he took the call from his furious commanding officer as he sat at the Hollywood couple’s Chateau Miraval in the South of France, having taken a fortnight’s leave from the Army to earn some extra money and do a favour for a friend.

After shouting a string of expletives, his SAS boss eventually calmed down and asked him whether after 27 years’ service in the Army, his new job made him happy, to which Billingham replied that it did, and with that, his exit papers from the regiment were arranged.

Billingham, 57, who is now chief instructor on the TV series SAS: Who Dares Wins, first started off moonlighting as a bodyguard to supplement his meagre SAS wages. He earned £10,000 a month – three times what he was earning in the military.

He also made the extraordinary revelation that in his first few days working for the couple, he realised that other Hollywood stars’ guards had been lying that they were also former SAS soldiers.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s bodyguard was fired from the SAS for moonlighting when his regiment commander spotted him pictured with them in the pages of Hello! magazine

Angelina Jolie and bodyguard Mark Billingham in 2007

Speaking to an audience at the Forum in Bath, Somerset, about his experiences, Bellingham describes a visit to the Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes with the couple. ‘Brad gives me the thumbs up that it is time to leave,’ he says. ‘I get up to walk through this hostile crowd of bodyguards. As I get up they are all smiling at me and pulling chairs out of my way.’

After they left, Bellingham asked a fellow guard, who was a woman, ‘What just happened then?’ He recalls: ‘She said, ‘Well, I said to them all [sarcastically] Why don’t all you SAS guys have a beer with a sergeant major from the SAS? And they all went, ‘Oh, f***’. That’s when I realised that every one of these bodyguards [had been claiming] to be in the SAS.

‘But I was the only one that was. The big bear on the door couldn’t even spell SAS. He was Italian. And this is the situation I was now in. Everyone I was meeting in the bodyguard community was reputedly in the SAS but not one of them were.’