THE SPIRIT OF ENDEAVOUR - (4/26/00) - John Thaw has become so associated with his role as Inspector Morse that it can be hard to separate one from the other. But while the television detective has been written off, the actor continues to be a source of intrigue.

Tea with Inspector Morse at the Old Bell in Malmesbury. It doesn’t get more English than this. A quite corner with the scent of furniture wax, the disreet traffic of trays and crockery, the abbey ruins through the window. He is spotted, of cause, as he always is by middle-age, middle-class women, there is a hint of a swoon. Perhaps they know he is about to die. Perhaps this adds urgency to their appetite for his live-in handsomeness and his genial intensity. He has made almost as many appearances in their fantasies as he has done on British television, which is a great deal. But all is not as it seems.

He is talking of Manchester half a century ago, the some district where the Gallagher bother from Oasis grew up. He is remembering how the other lads playing in the street would be called in for their tea at 6pm, but he and his younger bother would go into an empty house. Their mother had gone off with another man, and although she occasionally returned to give them grocery parcels, there father found it too painful and asked her to stop coming. He was a lorry driver and was often away for several days. While he was gone, the upstairs neighbours kept an eye on the boys. “But he was a very caring man”, says John Thaw, the acting Inspector. “Very practical and very real. The older I get, the more I can feel his influence. It was only quite recently that I became aware of it. If I see his qualities in a part, I am more likely to take it than if they are not there”.

Presumably they are there in the television role with which he has been most identified these past 13 years “I would say they are,” he says “I think the public can see that here’s a man who is on the whole sensitive to other people’s feelings and problems. Not least the problem of being a murderer. Sergeant Lewis [Morse’s sidekick] is a policeman fullstop, Whereas Morse is probably in the wrong job. He’s clever and a frightful snob, but people are warm to him because he is fallible rather than boorish.”

And doomed. The caring cop of the nineties occupies that strange fictive limbo between the book and the telly. Strictly speaking, he is already a goner, since Colin Dexter novel containing his death was published last September, but the message has yet to be absorbed by Morse’s 15 million viewers. Dexter is in the best of company. Agatha Christie killed off Hercule Poirot for fear of predeceasing him, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sniffed out Sherlock Holmes (for a while anyway) because the rest of his literary output was being upstaged. Like Thaw, Dexter has a certain autobiographical stake in the cultured detective, and anyone still seeking clues to the circumstances of Morse’s death should note that Dexter, the same age as his hero, has diabetes and is fond of a drink.

I ask Thaw if he will feel as bereaved as his public will after the transmission of the final two-hour Morse this autumn. After all, a familiar feature of popular cultural life is about to pass into the realms of heritage. He gives one of his rueful smiles and says he will be sorry to see him go. Morse he agrees has been good to him. “But then”, he adds, “he has been good to Carlton TV as well, so we will all miss that aspect. On the other hand, I don’t have to face that perennial question of whether I will be doing another one.”

Thaw is 58, but the knowledge that Morse is pushing 70 gives him the air of an older man. He is nine years younger than his second wife, the celebrated actress Sheila Hancock, and has barely been out of work since he came into the business 40 years ago. As is eager to point out, there was life before Morse and there will be life afterward. They live in a large house down the road in the Wiltshire village of Luckington, although they were apart for six months in the late Eighties while she was fighting her successful battle against breast cancer. “It is known that we did split while she was ill”, he says. “She left and went to live with our youngest daughter [they each have another daughter from their first marriages]. I went to live in London. She preferred to work it out on her own, so that she could combat the illness. At the time I was doing Morse as a regular series. It was partly because of that that she felt she would be better off on her own, rather than have me vanishing at six in the morning and coming back at nine in the evening.”

Perhaps people feel burdened by having someone else on their case when they are focusing hard recovery, Thaw nods, and recalls an episode of a medical drama series Plastic Man in which a patient faces a mastectomy. “She goes through exactly the same process as Sheila,” He says. “I think it’s to do with not wanting the responsibility of their partner’s fear”. And of not being an agent of their pain? “That too. At the time I was doing the programme, I was surprised by her [the character’s] behaviour, even though I had been close to something similar myself, and felt sympathetic.”

This transfer of feelings from the private to professional is happening again by his own admission. This time it concerns a television script called Buried Treasure, which tells the story of a man left looking after his granddaughter. After the girl’s mother dies, they come to London to try a find the father. “The guy I play is a Mancunian and so I find myself relating to how my father would have felt in that situation,” he says. “It’s as if I had died and Joanna [his daughter with Hancock] were left with my father and he had to go and find her mother.” There was a comparable sense of identification when two years ago in ITV’s wartime drama Goodnight Mister Tom he found himself playing an old widower who develops fatherly relationship with an abused evacuee boy. This was a difficult time for Thaw. Not only had his father died of cancer the previous year, but also a new biography of him claimed that he [John] had boycotted his mother’s funeral in 1974. This was as dramatic a turn as any he has performed but, he insists, it was pure faction.

He ponders it with his familiar puzzled frown. Then he says “I didn’t know she was dead until someone phoned me. That was weeks afterwards. Don’t believe everything you read. My father didn’t talk about it. We just didn’t talk about it back then. Her name was never mentioned. When it had to be, it took me quite a while to pluck up the courage and say, “mum died”. And dad said yes, he’d bumped into so-and-so and he’d told him. That was it, and there was no more said.”

The bareness of the word makes the story very moving. He says that if you did that in a television play, it would be devastating. “Only a few lines, isn’t it, but it tells you everything about our relationships. Not just ours with my mother, but the one between me an him, with me not wanting to hurt him by mentioning her name.”

The case of his own first marriage was different, he says. It failed because of his immaturity, his selfishness (his words) and the single-minded pursuit of his career. There were no family precedents for this line of work, although his mother had been an extrovert and a drop-the-hat singer. He did some stand up comedy with the local youth club on visits to old people’s homes, and got a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at the tender age of 16. For his audition he did a piece from Othello and another in French.

His age might have been a problem, as entrants had to be 18 to receive a grant. Fortunately his old headmaster persuaded the local authority that his case was exceptional. His father, meanwhile, was not opposed- just anxious. It was the late Fifties RADA of Tom Courtenay, Sarah Miles, and other, “good working actors who are still making a living despite not being household names” He says that while he was a student, his lack of confidence made him silent, which in turn made people a little scared of him, Courtenay was also nervous, but he’d been to university and impressed the future Morse with his cleverness. But Thaw turned out to be one of the most conspicuous talents, catching the eye Laurence Oliver, who gave him a sliver cigarette case (still cherished) as a birthday present.

At 19 he land a part in Z Cars, and in his early twenties starred in a series called Redcap, based on the special investigation branch of the military police. Then came his Jack Regan in the Sweeney, and the rest, you could say is a mystery. And the crime and detection, and series upon series.

He is one of the few British actors who can command a fee well into six figures for a series. There has been Kavanagh Q.C, Plastic man and the relative flop of A Year in Provence, and much besides. There has also been some memorable stage work, none more so then his portrayal of the embattle Labour leader in The Absence of War, part of the David Hare trilogy at the National Theatre. Like most male actor of similar matuuritey, and with a prominence that gives them the right to talk in this way, he acknowledges the wish to play King Lear one day. “No hurry yet, though.”

Nothing else? “Well, if someone offered me something else and I felt minded to do it, then perhaps yes. But Lear is the only part I would take any positive action to do”. I ask whether he has ever mentioned it to anyone in a position to bring it about, and he says, after another ruminative pause: “Well, actually, there was one time when I was going to do it and then, chickened out. I heard people who’d played it complaining about how it had taken over their lives; they said they’d wake up, clear their throat, check their voice because they were on in 12 hours, or six if it was a matinee day. And they said it was really depressing – you’d finish the show feeling utterly drained mentally and physically, and then you’d wake up the next morning thinking I’ve got to go and be physically and mentally drained again today. Or twice if it was a Wednesday or Saturday. So I rationalised it by saying I had plenty of time.”

As he just did. “Precisely.” None of this has persuaded him not to put his daughters – three of them - on the stage, although the truth is that they put themselves there. Joanna, 24, the youngest, finished at drama school last summer and has just done her first professional job, in Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Things at Salisbury Playhouse. The other two, Abigail, 33 and Melanie, 35, are both established actress.

Thaw and Hancock must have been a hard couple of acts to follow. “I think it was an extra burden for them”, he says. “it means that they are watched more intensely then you average actor. And it’s generally harder these days. There may be more work in some areas but there’s an awful lot of people chasing it.”

And even when you get work, it can fall through, even for Thaw. Carlton TV’s new second world war series, Monsignor Renard, was to have gone on as long as the conflict, with four episodes each year, the first batch set in 1940, the last in 1945. Now the projected cost of the venture has made Carlton call after the first foursome.

The title role is in the heart of Thaw country, a Catholic priest returning in May 1940 to the French town where he was born, just as the Germans are on the point of occupying it. The dilemmas of violence in the palpable just cause inhabit his features as they born there. When it comes to hinting at the presence of yet more issues of private conscience beneath the public and visible ones, this face is unsurpassed. Right now, however, its anguish is not directed at the Germans but at the aborting of the series.

“Yes I’m very disappointed.” He sighs. “At first I was angry as well. I was looking forward to it. I though it had legs, and that’s why I got involved. But it’s not just that I was comfortable with it; an awful lot of work had gone into it. The research, the costumes, everything. There was absolutely no cheating. It was all shot in France, with a huge cast. It meant there were all these English actors coming in daily on Eurostar. Meanwhile there were German actors flying in from Berlin and Munich. By modern standards it was a huge undertaking.”

Before filming started on the series, the producer Chris Kelly had approached Thaw with the idea of filming Graham Greene’s novel, The power and the glory. The whisky-priest at the center of the story is a natural a one for Thaw to act as it was for Greene to write. The man sags under the ancient yoke of Catholic guilt while at the same time being intrigued by his own moral fallibility Sadly the rights were already owned by an American film company. But Thaw says that if the change were to come his way, he could well be interested.

If you can’t take disappointments, he reflects, then this is not the business for you. They may feel like disaster, even bereavements, but nothing of the sort really. You have to get on with the next thing. He looks at his watch and says it’s time to go. There is a slight lack of resolve about him, as there often is with the inspector. It’s as though he has forgotten something like Morse. The difference between the two men is that whiles the fictional one has doubts about his calling, Thaw has none about his. The real problem now is how the women of Malmesbury and the rest of the nation will handle their own bereavement when Morse goes out this autumn and doesn’t come back.

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HANCOCK'S HALF CENTURY - (6/18/00) by Nicci Gerrard, The Observer - Sheila Hancock's 50-year career as an actress spans Carry On and the RSC. She saw her first husband die and beat cancer herself. Now she is preparing for old age - and EastEnders.

'Life goes by so fast, doesn't it? Now there's not that much time left. I've got so much less life than I've had.' Sheila Hancock is 67, a mother, a grandmother, a steadily working woman. She lost her first husband. She has had cancer herself. 'Life's never just smooth,' she says. 'Don't ever expect it to be.' She has been an actress for more than 50 years, since she was 15 and played Beth in Little Women. She has been in Carry On films (she was, apparently, the only woman Kenneth Williams would allow to use his lavatory), in sitcoms, in Hollywood films. She had her own TV slot (Now Seriously, it's Sheila Hancock). She was in the Actor's Company at the National Theatre, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She electrified in Sweeney Todd, in The Duchess of Malfi, in Gorky plays. As she says herself, people don't know whether she is a straight actress or a comedian, or what. 'They're confused. They say: "When are we going to see you back on telly?" If you do theatre, most people think you've died anyway. But I never had a career plan; I wasn't lucky enough to be that revered. I've just always been a working actress.' Most recently, she's been wacky and relaxed on Have I Got News For You , where most women get eaten alive (the secret is to be yourself, she says). On 6 July, she makes a cameo appearance on EastEnders. And she is currently making a film, directed by Nick Renton, called The Russian Bride; she plays the mother, with a rich past and exotic hair and make-up. It takes her an hour and a half to get ready each day, and when I meet her, there are still traces of greasepaint on her creased, triangular face.

She sits in an easy chair opposite me, kicks off her shoes, coils her slim legs, uses her long and slender hands with great animation, pointing and gesturing, and occasionally laying her fingers against her cheek in an expression of delightful astonishment. She is constantly mobile and animated. Her eyes shine under their dark brows. She has strong opinions, high passions, great affections. She likes, she says, to be 'entangled' with life; she never wants to waste it ('It's the only one we have, after all'). Her husband, the actor John Thaw (Morse, Kavanagh, grumpy, ageing sexpot) once said that she jumps into situations feet first, and only then realises there's a 20ft drop. Now, she says, she is 'trying to prepare for old age' - by which she absolutely doesn't mean trying to learn patience, serenity, invisibility, sweetness, or that slow withdrawal from turbulent life that old women especially are supposed to go through. Quite the reverse. 'Old age for women,' she says, 'is often so sad. It's such a waste. I'm a Quaker and I tell you, I meet lots of splendid old women there, in their nineties some of them. They are the sparkiest, most intelligent, most enlightened women I've ever come across. If I campaign - well, shout my mouth off, really - about older actresses being overlooked, it's because I regard it as a duty. If they're being overlooked on screen, then they're being overlooked in life too. Older women being preposterous, witty, difficult. Women with grey hair having sex! You have to look younger than your age; you're only a splendid old woman if you look 20 years younger than you are. How do you break that down? It's a battle.'

Her own face carries its 67 years of experience: it is vital and kind and curious and sexy and wry with age. She doesn't wear make-up ('but that's partly vanity anyway, because foundation gets in the cracks'). She won't have cosmetic surgery: 'I don't want to spend my old age pretending to be younger than I am. But I don't like sagging. The pull of gravity is hard to resist. I work out. And I want my face to be tidy.' She grins. 'A neat and tidy face. It's better than it was,' she continues. 'There are fabulous women doing comedy now, too - grotesque comedy even. God, not like when I was young. The battles when I tried to be extreme, or radical, or controversial - anything that wasn't ditsy Sheila, working-class Sheila. Everyone,' she says, sitting up in her chair with her bright eyes and speaking hands, 'everyone has to trailblaze.'

Sheila Hancock grew up in London. Her parents worked in pubs. 'My bedroom was above the bar and it was quite rough, lots of noise. I would lie there listening to this strange, mysterious clattering going on, shouting.' She was seven at the outbreak of the war, living first in King's Cross and then Bexley Heath ('Bomb Alley'). At eight she was evacuated to Berkshire. The local children 'resented us. We were quite bullied. I can hardly bear to think of it now - being put down in a strange place, away from our parents, or else living our life in London down holes really - sleeping in a shelter, having a lesson in a shelter, walking around in helmets and gas masks. I think that I am now a basically fearful person. There's a core of fear inside me. It's always there.' She spends her time with her grandchildren telling them how beautiful and bright and tremendous they are. 'So that they maybe won't be fearful like me.' She loves fearlessness and honesty and confidence - Germaine Greer is one of her idols, for her 'courage in this time of hype, of culling, of taking the middle way. A stunning woman.' Her own fearlessness - the engagement with life that John Thaw talks of, that makes her active, vociferous, candid - doesn't come naturally to her. It's a willed and plucky quality ('I've learnt my style from magazines,' she says). She's valiant.

Hancock's childhood fears make it surprising, perhaps, that she chose to become an actress (she has always suf fered from excruciating stage fright, which she now copes with by seeing a hypnotist). 'There weren't that many choices when I was young, not for someone like me.' She loved her grammar school, where she won a scholarship, and was inspired by many of her teachers - 'but I didn't want to be a teacher, or a nurse, which seemed the only other options. Then I was in Saint Joan at school and people were nice about it and I thought I'd try.' She went to Rada, and then 'disappeared into weekly rep and obscurity for years on end. I slogged around. Nobody noticed me. When I was young, my sort of person didn't fit in. I wasn't pretty and I had a bit of an accent. I've never felt,' she says, without any trace of false modesty, 'that I looked any good. All my life I've felt plain. Sometimes I look at photos of myself when young and I think, "Well, I don't look bad really, I've a good figure."'

I ask her what on earth she dislikes about her appearance. 'My chin,' she touches it. 'My chin's too big. And my nose,' she puts a finger to her nose, 'my nose is funny. I love beautiful women,' she says. 'I'm not jealous of them at all. I remember when I was at Rada, with Diane Cilento. I went to her flat, and she took a bath. She had skin like a peach and green eyes and blonde hair. I almost wept with pleasure when I saw her, she was so lovely. I was this plain version of her, which is probably why I was so moved by her. I like beautiful men too. I would have loved to have been beautiful; to have looked in the mirror and said: "God you look wonderful." Do people do that, I wonder. Love what they see in the mirror?'

In her late thirties, her father died. 'That hit me hard. His dying changed me. I was always a girl who wanted to please her dad, and he so wanted me to succeed. 'If I came home and said "I came second?" he'd say "Who was first?" I was a grammar school kid and my parents weren't educated. I look back with enormous regret and pain at that time in my life when I grew away from them. I didn't despise them exactly, but I felt, well, grand, superior. My father died very suddenly, before we had time to say things. My mother died a year later, of cancer, and we came back to each other before she died. I nursed her and in the last few months we were very close. We don't tell our mothers we admire them enough, do we - or I didn't. She wasn't a woman who talked easily about her emotions. I remember washing her one day and saying "God Mum, what a lovely nose you've got." She said, "All my life I've hated my nose." [Clearly, the anxiety about noses runs in her family.] I thought, how is it I've never told her before how beautiful she is. Her lovely nose.'

A year later, Hancock's first husband, the actor Alec Ross, also died of cancer, a long, drawn-out death. 'It was a nasty period, yes. There was a lot of suffering - for them,' she adds hastily, not for her. She coped with the grief and loss by getting involved with the hospice movement. 'You've got to allow yourself the sorrow and then you've got to be practical. I thought: "I'll do something with these feelings." But this is just life,' she says - everyone's life. She's no different, except she is luckier than most people, with money, security, family, a job she loves. 'Life is not continual joy for anyone. Life is something that has to be lived and [she wrinkles up her nose] achieved. We have to earn our right to be here. Interspersed with the struggles are the glorious times. But they cannot be continuous. If you are a thinking person, they cannot be. Even when you are having a wonderful time, you must know there are others who are suffering. Life is not a bowl of cherries. It is a series of things you get over and survive - if you're lucky enough. Some people's life is made up of suffering. I worry when I come across people who expect life to be just happy, who expect to be beautiful and healthy and successful and perfect. Life is a hill you must climb. Just take a deep breath and do it.'

Even after those three deaths, Hancock 'always had hope. There's a working-class steeliness in the middle of me, a will to survive.' In 1973 she married Thaw, and they are married still, with three daughters between them, grandchildren whom they adore, a house in France, a cottage in Wiltshire, a flat in London, but, she says, 'a rackety old domestic life really. We work terrible hours.' She insists on their 'ordinariness'. She says they are blessed. Sometimes, she says, they look at their lives and feel proud of how far they have come. 'John'll say: "Well, a bit of a change from the council flat." It can feel unreal. We don't take it for granted, not at all, not for a minute.'

Twelve years ago, Sheila Hancock had breast cancer. It did not, she says, 'ennoble' her, but it did teach her to make the most of whatever time she had left, 'although that's simply from getting older, as well. You learn to savour life. You look at a sunset and you realise how wonderful it is. You give yourself the time.' Cancer, she says, with all its attendant pain and fear, was 'nothing, absolutely nothing, I can't even think about it', compared to the emotions she went through 18 months ago when her grandson, Jack, had a brain tumour. 'We could have lost him. Anything else pales into insignificance. I lose a job, so fucking what? Cancer - huh. I couldn't do anything, boss the doctors, make arrangements - that wasn't my job, that was my daughter's job. I could only be there if I was wanted. Crying and praying and waiting. It's the closest I have ever come to not being able to cope.' She puts her hand over her mouth and stares at the memory.

She wants to go on working. She wants to learn the piano ('but I want to be brilliant - first not second'). She wants to write a novel (she has the first three chapters but calls them 'crap'). She has just built a sandpit in her garden for her beloved grandchildren. She still has her centre of fear. She remembers once taking part in a show called Night of a Hundred Stars. She was waiting in the wings with Millicent Martin. 'I was dying with fear. I said to Millie, 'Aren't you scared?' and she said 'No, why should I be? I wouldn't be here if they didn't want me.' And she went on and was marvellous and I went on and I was ghastly. I loved her spirit. I love that kind of confidence in women. I have a friend who knows she's pretty, and wonderful. Her parents told her so all her childhood. It's a joy to be with her. She bubbles with pleasure. So in the moment. She's never whingeing or saying, "Oh, am I all right?" It must be so tiresome to be with me. People must get so impatient. I bet they want to shake me and shake me.' I don't think so. Hug, maybe.

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"I KNEW SOMETHING WOULD HAPPEN; THINGS WERE JUST TOO GOOD" - (8/2/01) - That was the feeling Sheila Hancock had when she talked to Annie Leask just weeks before news broke that her husband John Thaw had cancer. Here she talks for the first time about how they are coping.

When I met Sheila Hancock earlier this year she was talking animatedly about a subject close to her heart: human compassion – or the lack of it in today’s society. The night before she had witnessed a tramp being dumped, like a lump of meat, on a stretcher by two ambulance men. “I know those guys hate dealing with these people because they are smelly and infested, but I caught this man’s eyes and thought, ‘My God. One time this man was a child and he has come to this’,” She said, her face wrung with concern.

“I would have felt better if I had stopped and held that guys hand. I do feel bad that I didn’t. I can still see him in my head and he will haunt me for some time.” This is typical of Sheila. She has been a committed Quaker for several years. She believes we bear a responsibility for the wider community and is driven by a need to understand the human psyche. “I was a child in the Second World War. There were some horrific things done then and I find as I get older, before I die, I have a need to understand that. I am grief stricken that humans can behave in the way we do and I have always had this core of fear. Life is a battle and I suppose that is why we are fearful – we know we could go out the door and something dreadful could happen. Not only to us but to our loved ones.”

As we talked she went on to say how blessed she felt with her husband of 28 years, actor John Thaw. Poignantly, she added. “You sit there thinking ‘Hold on something’s going to happen…it can’t be this great.” That conversation, of course, was just a few weeks before the announcement that John had cancer of the oesophagus. Her words would ring in her ears…”something’s going to happen”…

Having only interviewed John a few months earlier – and talked to him about how he was planning to take life a bit easier, spent more time in the garden and with their three grandchildren after finishing his 14 years as Inspector Morse – I like millions of fans was as shocked as if a friend had announced the news. Understandably, when Sheila and I communicated again, she admitted she was still finding it hard to “talk in any lucid way about it all at the moment” and that both of them were avoiding reading all articles about that form of throat cancer “in order to stay positive. We are only going through something that thousands of other people have to. It is just the fact that we do it more publicly,” she said. “And John is responding marvellously to the treatment.”

Sheila is no Stranger to cancer. She lost her first husband actor Alec Ross to it in 1971 and in the late Eighties she fought her own battle with breast cancer – a lump was removed and she had six weeks of radiotherapy. It was a difficult time and she and John separated for six months. Nowadays she still needs annual check ups and on top of her work with prison reform groups and the homeless, she helps other suffers by giving them advice. When we had met that day at her club The University Woman’s Club in Audley Square, West London – ostensibly to talk about her new TV project The Russian Bride – she said frankly. “I think it is important to understand and than take action, join a compaign and try and change things. But I don’t try and do everything any more. Now I say no to things. I didn’t used to. That’s how I got ill. John calls it my ‘Messiah complex’ trying to run everyone’s lives. I did definitely spread myself too thinly, wanting to be loved and be good.

“I always believed that if I worked hard enough I could make the perfect world. How appallingly arrogant! I don’t believe that now, but I do believe that I can make a difference. . I was forced to stop by becoming ill. I had to take stock. Now I am more choosy and work for things very passionately and then move on to leave other people to carry on. Some people get healed from cancer without changing their lives at all, but I think I pushed myself to hard. Now I am much more tune with it – because I am frightened of getting cancer again.”

One would think she and John – who last his father to cancer three years ago – would be taking stock now. But since John’ illness was announce, Sheila says they are determined to lend a normal life as possible – “We do not want to be portrayed as the usual ‘brave Sheila’ and ‘battling John’.” And that includes carrying on with what thy have done all their lives – work.

Sheila describes herself as the sort of person who can never put her feet up without feeling guilty. “It’s the working class ethic,” she said. “I also feel guilt about earning more than I deserve. All you can do is give a lot of it away, pay your taxes and appreciate what you have. John and I know what it is like not to have a lot and that is deeply ingrained in us. We may have become middle class and by most people’s standards rich. But deep within us is what I was and what John was and you can’t take that away.”

Sheila was the second daughter of a pub manger and was brought up in London’s King Cross. John, 59, was born in Manchester, the eldest son of a lorry driver. The met in 1969 when they were cast together in a stage comedy called So Want About Love? And married four years later. Even now Sheila says they are planing a TV project together. In the meantime, we will be seeing a lot more of Sheila. She has the lead role as ‘the mother in law from hell’ in The Russian Bride, a gripping two-part drama on ITV tonight and tomorrow. Her character, Dora Blossom, is a former chorus girl who bullies her sexually-repressed son into taking a bride from a Russian agency – with murderous consequences.

“When I read the script I thought, ‘this is my part and I don’t want anyone else to have it’. So I called Fenwichs and described the character and they pulled together some incredible.” Sheila, who actually looks far younger than her 67 years with smooth skin and striking high cheekbones, arrived at the audition wearing a red leather bomber jacket, a black leather mini skirt and red and black 5in heels. “My feet were in agony, but it was wonderful to see the look on their faces when I teetered in.” she was told on the spot the part was hers. Next month Sheila will also be seen in BBC’s comedy drama Bedtime, with Timothy West, Meera Syal and Stephen Tompkinson as one side of a bickering couple married for 30 years.

Sheila and John are due to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve. No doubt there will be even more cards from well wishes, judging by the enormous wave of support they have had following the news of John’s cancer. Support even extended to a group of people ‘nearly lynching’ at one photographer who was trying to sneak a picture of them shopping. “We have been inundated by wonderful letters from members of the public and John felt very moved and upheld by their prayers and recovery stories,” she said. Could it be that Sheila’s faith in human nature has at last been restored? Let’s hope so.

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FROM RUSSIA WITHOUT LOVE? - by Paula Kerry (8/2/01) - Sheila Hancock tells how she won the role of the mum who arranges a doomed marriage for her son in ITV’s "The Russian Bride: Sheila Hancock wanted the part of Dora. The mother-in-law from hell, in the new drama The Russian Bride, so badly she turned up for the audition in black fishnet tights and a black leather miniskirt!

“I wore red pony-skin boots with stiletto heels and a red leather jacket too,” she says with glee. “And I put on loads of make-up. I could hardly walk but I wanted them to see how keen I was. When I walked in, the producer gulped, but I really sold myself. I did the fall bit. I said ‘I was born for this part. My sister was in variety and I know the character already.’ Then I didn’t hear anything for a week and imagined I’d totally humiliated myself and that everyone thought I was round the twist, I was thrilled.”

The two-part drama tells how fallen variety singer Dora arranges a marriage for her timid middle aged son Christopher. But his bored new Russian wife, Natasha, embarks on an affair with an out-of work actor, Eddie, leading to heartbreak and tragedy for all concerned. “I feel sorry for Dora,” Says Sheila, who also recently appeared in Eastenders as Steve Owen’s menacing mum. “Dora’s slept around a bit and had a hard life. She loves her son with a passion and than this hussy comes along and destroys her life.”

Sheila’s own marriage to actor John Thaw hasn’t been without incident. John is being treated for cancer of the oesophagus, and Sheila has fought Breast cancer. She is now president of the charity Action Against Breast Cancer. “I live by the cliché ‘live the moment’ which I leant to adopt at Bristol Cancer Help Centre, where I was treated. It is pointless worrying about the future or dwelling on the past.”

The couple, who have three daughters, Melanie, 35, Abigail, 34 and 26 year-old Joanna, divide their time between their London home, their cottage in Wiltshire and their home in France. “There’s nothing the two of us like more than curling on the sofa and watching TV in the evening. We’ve been married for 28 years and we still moan about the same things. We are like Jim and his misses from The Royal Family.”

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JOHN THAW ON MORSE - (10/30/00) - John Thaw can thank his alter ego Inspector Morse for teaching him about the darker forces of life. In 15 years as the dour detective with a passion for Wagner and real ale, he has been stalked by obsessive fans, had his privacy and family life invaded, and even been brought face to face with his own mortality.

Fame has come at a high price to the 58-year-old star. For most of his 40- year career he has been hounded by female stalkers. One woman in particular frightened him so much that he’s not prepared to go into too much detail for fear of reprisals. “I haven’t heard from her for a few years so I don’t want to remind her, you do understand that?” he says in his gravely Lancashire drawl. “But it was very scary. She changed her name to mine by deed poll. It was not a pleasant experience.

“I had the some thing on The Sweeney, a female stalker. So it’s been going on for years. I’ve come to terms with it now, but it took me a while to accept it. I used to think “Well I do my job and hopefully give people pleasure, but surely that’s where my responsibility ends?” but there are people out there who want a little bit more.”

John has leaned to live with the fame his prolific career has brought, and has begrudgingly adapted his private life, too. He is married to actress Sheila Hancock, 67, and their home is a five–bedroom C18th manor house in Wiltshire. They have three actress daughters – Abigail, 33, from John’s first marriage to stage manger Sally Alexander, Melanie, 36, from Sheila’s first marriage to Alec Ross, and Joanna, 24. Being instantly recognised means John and Sheila plan outing carefully.

“It’s rare for us to go shopping together because that attracts Sheila’s fans and my fans. And when you’ve got two lots of fans, it’s difficult” he says, although not unkindly. “The girls laugh when we tell them we’re going out for an evening they say, “We know where you’re going”, and they’re right. It will be one of three restaurants where we can sit in a corner and have a lovely meal and not be pestered or stared at.

“You feel you’re on show all the time. It’s not so much the people that come and say, “Can you sign this?” It’s the people who stop talking at the next table because they want to hear want you are saying. They pretend to be looking a picture above your head but there’re staring at you. And that’s just…. Well…. Boring. Then the evening’s ruined and you’re thinking, “How soon can we get the bill and go?”, so that’s why go to boring restaurants, as our daughters would say,” he finishes with a laugh.

Seeing John laugh is a strange experience. His most famous roles – no-nonsense Morse, hard hitting barrister James Kavanagh and the Sweeney’s tough talking Jack Regan – are known for their moodiness, and they rarely smile. Which is a shame because John has even white teeth and a craggy, well-worn grin. And his eyes, a captivating turquoise, light up when he talks, especially when the conversation turns to his grandchildren – Melanie’s children Jack, five and Lola, two, and Abigail’ two year old daughter Molly May.

“I love spending time with them. Their imaginations are so vivid at that age” he says, “I talk to them like little people. I can’t do baby talk. It took me a while to get use to being a grandfather. Rightly or wrongly I did think “Now I am an old man, I’m on my way out and this is the next generation”…”

But nothing made him stare his own mortality in the face more filming the final ever episode of Inspector Morse, to be shown on ITV on November 15. In the Remorseful Day, Colin Dexter kills of his famous policeman. “It took me completely by surprise as it did, no doubt, Colin Dexter’s publisher”, says John with a grin “It’s rare for an author to kill off what is, let’s face it a golden goose. But Colin’s had enough. He’s in his 70’s, he doesn’t want to write any more, he wants to enjoy his life. Quite right too. “As an actor, it takes away that responsibility of thinking, “Should I do it again or not?” I certainly wasn’t unhappy about it.”

In the final film, we will see hard-drinking Morse, who has suffered from stomach ulcers, collapse from the heart failure to the haunting tones of Fraure’s in Paradisum. And in an emotional farewell, Morse’s sidekick Lewis, played by Kevin Whately, visits the mortuary where his boss lies on a slab. He leads down and kisses his forehead. No words are spoken. John says there was an eerie atmosphere filming these scenes, not least because they were done in an actual mortuary.

“The crew were very quite that day” he recalls “Everyone just got on with there jobs because it marked the end of an era for all of us. Sometimes we had to stop filming while they brought in or took out a body; it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

I did find it emotionally draining. It’s clear that Morse is not a well man. I wore pale make-up to make me look ill and I had to play ill, so he has less energy. As an actor you have to convince your self you fell physically rough with this pain. I carried that with me, unfortunately. I’d go home and fell unwell. It’s psychosomatic – if you convince your brain that you’re not well, then you act accordingly.”

Last month John sat down alone and watched the final edited version. By the end he was fighting back the tears. “Seeing yourself on a mortuary slab pulls you up,” he says quietly. “I’d done a past Morse when he was in hospital and even with that you think ‘This could be me tomorrow or in six months time, I could be here as John Thaw’. It remains you of your own mortality. It makes me fell lucky I am not to have any illness. But at the same time it could well be me tomorrow, it could be my turn.”

He has no regrets at leaving Morse behind, but John will miss co-star Kevin.

“I really enjoyed working with Kevin, he’s a lovely man,” he says. “As I watched those last scenes together I welled up. Those sorts of relationships don’t grow on trees; I’m lucky that I’ve had that twice in my career. First with Dennis Waterman in the Sweeney and than Kevin. It’s rare that you hit it off so well on screen and off.

“A lot of water’s gone under the bridge one way or another,” he adds. “A lot of people died, people who were involved in it since we started. The first producer died three years after we started and a few actors have gone. The head of the props department sadly died. Assistant producer Rory Greenwood, who also worked on The Sweeney with me, died too.

“These people set the foundation for it – how it would be made, how much it would cost, how long it would take to shoot, who many people would be employed on it. Those things are vital in setting up any series. It’s like a house, once you’ve got the foundations right, you can do what you like.

“They don’t make dramas like that any more, they just won’t spend the money, so it’s as end of that kind of era too,” he concludes with a resigned shrug.

John’s own story also has share of sadness. He was born and bred in Manchester, and came from a broken home. When he was 6, mum Dolly walked out on his lorry driver father, also called John, leaving him to raise John and his younger brother Ray. “In those days my dad’s role as a single father was rare, but he was an exceptional man and very loving father,” says John. “He was like a brother to me, too.”

With his father away from home a lot, it was down to John to look after Ray, who was a year younger. John left school at 16 with one O level in English and worked as a porter at Manchester’s fruit market. He had started as a barker’s apprentice when a chance meeting with an actress led him to addition for, and win, a place at top drama school, RADA. He met Sheila when they appeared on stage together in 1969. His first marriage at 22 had lasted three years and failed because he was too absorbed in his work. A few years later, he and Sheila met up again and fell in love. On Christmas Eve in 1973 they married.

“We love each other very much,” he says frankly. “We need and respect each other, we’re great friends, we make each other laugh, still, and we moan about the same things. I think we’re lucky.” Certainly they are survivors. Their marriage has endured bleak times, including the couples temporarily separating for six months, the death of John’s parent’s death of cancer, and Sheila’s own successful battle against the disease.

“Sheila’s breast cancer changed the way we think,” He says choosing his words carefully. “It teaches you to enjoy the moment and live for it. It made us more spontaneous and courageous. From that point of view, at least, the illness was very positive.” It also prompted John to let work take a back seat, although he has no plans to retire.

“When you stop getting work you’re retired,” he says. “Anyway, I’d miss the camaraderie of working with a group of people. I’ve certainly got more time for my family. I can give them more of myself than I could have done five years ago. Then I was probably thinking, ‘I’d better go and look at that scene’, whereas now I think ‘that scene can wait…’”

One of the things he won’t be doing with his spare time is joining Sheila on her weekly visit to the gym. “Sheila goes to the gym regularly,” He smiles, patting his modest but slightly protruding belly. “She tries to get me to go but it doesn’t seem to work. I say I keep fit by working, I’m on my feet a lot and working long hours. I admit I am overweight but if I didn’t watch what I ate I’d be a lot more so.

“Sometimes before filming a Morse I’ll be out at a meal and think, ‘well, the old bugger drinks too much, he doesn’t eat the right things, so I can have that pudding because I’m only being truthful to be the character’. It’s is an excuse, although a very good one, isn’t it?” he laughs. “Mind you,” He adds with a sudden Morse like frown “I won’t be able to use that one any more.”

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"SHEILA IS MY BASE" - (11/13/00) - Inspector Morse star John Thaw knows what it is like to gamble with love.

Twelve years ago he and his actress wife Sheila Hancock took the drastic step of separating after she was diagnosed with cancer. Sheila, a fiercely independent woman, left him for six months so she could concentrate on battling the deadly illness single-mindedly and in private.

A weaker husband might have crumbled, along with the marriage. But John used the break to learn how to love his wife even more than before. And after six months apart they both an overwhelming desire to get back together. Now as they prepare to celebrate their 27th wedding anniversary this Christmas Eve, their bond is stronger than ever. “Ultimately the split brought us together,” he says. “When are apart you think of the good qualities in the other person.

“You also think of the bad qualities in yourself, rather than the other way around. Both of you are going through the same process. So when you get together you have already gone through a self-counselling thing. You start on a level playing field. Certainly in are case we realised immediately what attracted us to each other in the first place. I find her very attractive and sexy and talented and clever, she is a very giving person too.”

Sheila, 67, is never far from John’s mind. “She is vitally important.” He says. “She’s my base, my roots. I know at the end of the day I’ll be going home to see her, which is what keeps me going. If I lived on my own, what would I be doing it all for? When either of us is away on location it’s important we speak every day.”

Twenty million viewers will settle into their armchairs on Wednesday evening for one of the TV highlights of the year – the death of Morse. After 14 years, the curmudgeonly, opera-loving detective collapses With a heart attack on the lawns at Exeter College Oxford. But before Morse breathes his last, his trusty sidekick Sergeant Lewis, played by Kevin Whately, gently kisses his forehead in a very emotional scene.

Even John, the son of a tough working class miner-turned lorry driver, had a tear in his eye as he watched the recorded scene for the first time. “I was choked up to say the least,” he admits. “I thought, “well that’s it. What a same” It is sad. But I think it was the best way to end it. It’s good to have a definite end.”

Of his relationship with Kevin, John says “As I watched those last scenes with him I just welled up, those sort of relationships don’t grow on trees. “Morse is an arrogant, rather pompous, well-educated intellectual. Lewis is anything but. Very down-to-earth, probably not all that educated. Morse is a little patronising to Lewis but he envies him. Lewis is going home to his wife and two children but Morse doesn’t have that. Therefore you’ve a classic double act.”

Even after 33 film-length episodes of the Carlton TV drama, John would have loved Morse to carry on. “It’s been the best television job I have ever had.” he says. The worldwide success of Morse is phenomenal. It has regularly attracted 18million viewers in Britain alone, and been screened in 200 countries from Canada to Papua New Guinea. And it has made the Inspector a silver-haired sex symbol. Thaw says, “Although the letters I receive from women begin “Dear John” I know they are really writing to Morse. He is attractive – not because of the way he looks – but because he is a challenge. He is set in his ways and women think they can change him.”

John has just finished filing a one-off special of Kavanagh QC. Now he is working on a drama called The Glass in which he plays a married businessman who has an affair with a younger woman, played by former Coronation Street star Sarah Lancashire. But it is Morse who remains close to his heart. They share the same passion for classical music and cars. And like Morse, John drives a Jaguar. And he is reminded of his quite, thoughtful side of the TV detective. “I tend to get very in on myself at times and think a lot,” he admits. “People think I am depressed but I’m not. I’m just thinking hard about whatever is on my mind. But I’m not as stubborn as him.”

John and his younger brother Ray, who now lives in Australia, were brought up by their father, John Snr, in working class area of Manchester. Their mother, Dolly, walked out on the family when John was just 7. At 16, he moved to London to train at the RADA. In the 42 years since, he has rarely been out of work. His first major break was in The Sweeney, when he starred as all-action copper Jack Regan alongside Dennis Waterman.

“Money helps drive you,” John says, “But I think all actors are looking for approval. You just want people to say, “That was good I believed that character. Dad gave us all that we needed and he was a great man, a great father. But maybe it was my mother’s approval I craved because she wasn’t there. When I could only just walk I was doing shows – trying to impress people or make them laugh. I chose to show off for a living.”

John has tried to be as good a father to his own daughters as his dad was to him. He adopted Melanie, now 36, Sheila’s daughter by her first husband, actor Alec Ross, who died of cancer in 1971. Abigail, 35, is his daughter from his first marriage to Sally Alexander. And John and Sheila have a daughter, Joanna, now 25, from their own marriage. “I will always try to see their point of view, which is what my dad did,” John says. “They don’t have to do as I say – we discuss it. I think I am a good dad.

“They know I’m always there for them. But there’s a big difference. My dad had to be mother and father, whereas my children luckily had a mother all their lives. My mother leaving certainly made me want to be there for my children more. But it never affected my views of my own marriage. I have always simply thought “Why should this break up? I love you. This relationship is important.” And I can safely say Sheila has felt exactly the same. That’s why we are still together."

“There isn’t a secret of a happy marriage. It’s the old cliché about having a sense of humour, being a laugh together. We laugh about silly things and have exactly the same sense of humour.” Their biggest crisis came when Sheila developed breast cancer in 1988 and later found it returning as bone cancer in 1994. Thankfully she is now clear of the illness. Despite being one of TV’s top actors John shuns the limelight. “I would much rather go for a quite meal with mates. Than go to premieres or nightclubs,” He says. “I get approached quite a bit when I am out, which one thing that puts me off.”

An Irishman came up to me once in London and said ‘Do you know where St. Mary’s Church is?’ I said ‘It’s just here.’ Then he said ‘I know you don’t I? You’re that John Throw-up aren’t you’ I said ‘ yes that’s right’ So I call myself that sometimes.”

Although Morse is coming to an end, John wants to carry on working a lot longer. “Why would I give up in this business?” he says with a laugh. “The only reason you give up is if you can’t remember your lines or moves. I enjoy it too much to retire.”

John Thaw on Morse:

• ON BEING ASKED TO PLAY MORSE: I was hesitant at first. I’d already played a policeman in the Sweeney. I remember speaking to the late Kenny McBain, who produced the first series of Morse. I said ‘what’s different?’ Kenny’s description of the guy as a music lover, a more cerebral person than old Jack Regan convinced me that it was different enough to give it a go.

• ON MORSE AND WOMEN: He’s a romantic but he is too self-centered, too selfish. He can’t give of himself. I think you need to be able if you are to love someone and to be loved and he can’t do it. He holds something back.

• ON MORSE CHARCTER: He’s a sad man and I feel sorry for him, possibly not as sorry as he fells for himself in his quite moments. Morse thinks he can exist on his own and he only releases at the end that he can’t and never really has be able too. He is clever, very well read intellectual. He’s a walking dictionary but he is also an arrogant man.

• ON SIMILARTIES BETWEEN THAW AND MORSE: I like classical music.

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"I DIDN'T KNOW WHICH WAS MORSE AND WHICH WAS ME" - (11/15/00) - Morse is Dead. His body lies in an open coffin in a chilly, cheerless mortuary. Enters Sergeant Lewis to pay his last repeats. Unemotionally, he plants a soft kiss on Morse’s forehead, turns and leaves.

It’s a fitting low-key farewell to the 13 memorable Morse years that made a massive star of John Thaw, the actor who put flesh on author Colin Dexter’s grumpy, cultured copper whose best friends were a rack of classical CD’s and a bottle of Glenfiddich.

“I found it very sad doing that last scene,” says John. “I really shouldn’t have, it’s only a part, but Morse has been a part of my life for so long, and I was a bit emotional. I know Kevin Whately was too. I didn’t know what the scene was like till I saw the finished film, but he did it beautifully. He told me later he was fighting back the tears because he thought it was wrong to cry in the context of the sense.”

We meet to talk about Morse in the suite of a London hotel. John has been nibbling unenthusiastically at a plate of assorted sandwiches, and he sips fizzy water – unlike Morse, he never drinks. He’s in navy jacket and blue and white gingham shirt and he looks fit and tanned. He considers his answers carefully, shaping them up in his mind before he speaks. At 58, he’s unruffled, a man very much at peace with himself.

John says the thing he will miss most about Morse is working with Kevin Whately, who recalls a tough first meeting in 1986, a year before the first episode went out. But the two quickly developed a brilliant partnership, not just as actors but as friends. “We always shared a caravan on set,” says John. “Kevin could have had his own but he chose to share with me because we got on so well and we’d go through scenes and lines together. He’s very easy to like, a very nice guy.” Morse’s relationship with Lewis (never buying a round, always treating Lewis as if his brain was a few million cells short of his) was one of the best things about the show. “Early on it was very much a servant and master relationship,” John remembers. “But later on Lewis started to come back at Morse more and stand up for himself, which I thought was good because it added to the humour.

“It was never shown but I always felt in my own mind that Morse would go home most nights, have a whiskey, put a record on and say to himself, ‘Why did I do that?’ ‘Why didn’t I keep my month shut?’ ‘Why did I hurt him?’ of course, sadly for Morse he had no-one to talk it through with.”

It’s that lonely sadness that John singles out when asked for a lasting memory of the character. “We were making an episode and Morse and Lewis were standing on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Lewis was going to meet his wife for a holiday, and Morse was flying back home, but there was just time for Morse to see an opera before his flight and he asked Lewis what he was doing, hoping he was going to join him. Lewis replies that’s he’s off to pick up his wife from the airport.

“I remember there were hundreds of people watching us as we did this little scene, and I say ‘OK, I’ll see you when you get back.’ And I turn and walk up the steps on my own. I remember doing that and feeling so choked up. It was rare for me to feel this, as an actor. I, John Thaw, felt so sad for this man. For a moment I didn’t know which was Morse and which was me. I shouldn't have because, in the end, it was only a part.”

John thinks it was Morse’s vulnerability – and his frequent ability to bark up the wrong tree – that endeared him to so many people. “It’s one of the things I loved about him, the way he got things wrong but was so convinced he was right. Sometimes he’d be chasing the wrong man for three-quarters of an episode. He was never Sherlock Homles.”

But how close was irascible Morse to John himself? “Playing Morse, you have to use aspects of yourself, that’s all you have. So if his being cutting or sarcastic, those are things which are in you. But sometimes I’ve played a scene and said to myself, ‘wait a minute, that came too easily. I’d better watch it’.

John Thaw’s name is now stamped on two great TV icons – The Sweeney’s rough-edged Jack Regan and the surly, cerebral Morse. So what more has the man got to prove? “We’ve all got to work. There’s only one thing you need in acting – remembering your lines. As long as I can do that, and as long as I’m asked, I’ll do it. But maybe not as much. Perhaps I’ll take longer breaks.

“Than again, when I’m older,” he says wistfully. “I could be doing two or three cameo scenes just like Johnny Gielgud did. Four hours a day… a good lunch. Nice work if you can get it.”

Next: Articles & Interviews (Pt.9)