Sheila Hancock’s wonderful memoir The Two of Us gives excellent insights into the personality and demons of the brilliant late actor John Thaw, who famously played Inspector Morse in one my favourite television series of all time.
The event that had such a devastating impact on Thaw’s life, as told by Hancock, was the day his mother Dorothy (or Dolly as everyone called her) walked out on the family, leaving the seven-year-old John and his younger brother Jack deprived of a maternal figure they adored.
This profound loss was the underlying force behind the intensity of his acting (he was utterly dedicated to the craft, though never comfortable with being a celebrity). But his mother’s disappearance from his life also fuelled a great anger and rage that turned Thaw into a heavy drinker and a verbally and emotionally abusive husband.
Hancock is incredibly honest about the challenges of her marriage to Thaw, which was unbearable at times. But she also writes of the later years of their marriage when Thaw stopped drinking and their relationship found an even, and very loving and devoted keel.
However, the great tragedy of it all was that after all the years of heartache, the splits and re-unitings, Thaw should fall very ill with cancer just as they were truly happy together.
Hancock, herself a celebrated actor of the stage and screen (now 92, I last saw her in a small role in the excellent cold case series Unforgotten) was married to John Thaw for nearly 30 tumultuous years and was with him the day he died in 2002 after battling cancer.
Hancock, was left utterly devastated by John Thaw’s death, despite their very volatile marriage.
No doubt a cathartic experience, she published the memoir in 2004 – just two years after he passed away from cancer and just four years after the final episode of Inspector Morse, The Remorseful Day, aired.
It’s quite an unusual book because it’s both an autobiography of Hancock’s life – who was made a Dame in 2011 for services to drama and charity work – and a biography of John Thaw, who shunned the celebrity life, and would probably never have written an autobiography.
It retells their family histories – Hancock was born on the Isle of Wight in 1933 and grew up living above pubs including in the rough and tumble of King’s Cross, London, while Thaw, nine years younger than her, spent his youth in the working-class suburbs of Manchester.
She writes about their first marriages, the trajectories of their acting careers (her close friends include the Carry On actor Kenneth Williams) and how intimidated she was when she first met Thaw when they began acting together on the West End play, “So What About Love?” in 1969.
“The first week of rehearsal of So What about Love? was an unmitigated disaster. I always approach a new role convinced that I cannot play it and on the few occasions that John Thaw looked up from his script, his expression of contempt implied that he agreed,” Hancock writes of their first encounter.
But Thaw quickly warmed to Hancock, and she to him, as he – like his great detective character Inspector Morse – revealed his love for classical music, art and fine wine.
They married in a registry office in 1974. While initially things went well, Thaw’s drinking and depression worsened, and their marriage deteriorated. Hancock paints a quite different picture of their marriage to the one described by Thaw on an episode of the famous BBC series (now a podcast) Desert Island Discs recorded in 1990. On it, he suggests that they had sorted out their problems (mostly to do with his acting commitments), whereas the truth of the situation was a lot darker – as recounted by Hancock in her book.
“By 1990, both Morse and Home to Roost [a sitcom Thaw starred in] were in the Top 10 of the ratings. John was at the height of his popularity but off-screen he was fighting profound depression.”
It would take another five years for Thaw to seek professional help, quit drinking and reunite permanently with Hancock. From then on, they lived blissfully.
After his death – her recounting of Thaw’s final days in diary entries is so very moving – she took a keen interest in learning more about her late husband’s mother, to understand why she had made such a devastating decision to leave her children.
To her great credit, Hancock does not demonise Dolly even though she caused Thaw so much pain, and in turn herself through their turbulent marriage.
“I will attempt to get inside Dolly’s skin, as if I was going to play her and try to understand what John never could or would.”
Alongside Hancock’s wonderful writing, The Two of Us is full of many great photographs, both professional and personal. Perhaps the most interesting and saddest of all is a faded and crumpled picture of Thaw taken with his mum on a rare union.
Hancock captioned it by saying: “It was found in her (Dolly’s) bag when she died.”
Her interest in the forces that moulded her husband – both good and terrible – make this a marvellous memoir. Any fan of John Thaw and Hancock (who is far too self-deprecating in her writing) will enjoy reading it, as I did.
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