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When John Thaw, the star of The Sweeney, Inspector Morse and Goodnight Mister Tom, died from cancer in 2002, a nation lost one of its finest actors. Sheila Hancock lost a beloved husband. In this unique double biography she chronicles their lives - personal and professional, together and
apart.
John Thaw was born and brought up in Manchester. His mother ran off when John was seven, and his father, a long-distance lorry driver, was often away, leaving John and his brother to manage alone. Acting was not an obvious choice of career but his timing was perfect: it was the sixties; theatre and TV were hungry for new voices and his natural, intuitive style of acting. With his roles in Z-Cars and The Sweeney, fame came quickly. But in a long and enduringly successful career in theatre and TV, it was John's role as Morse that secured him widespread popular and critical acclaim.
In 1974 John married Sheila Hancock with whom he shared a working-class background, a RADA education and a huge talent for acting - Sheila was already the star of the sixties TV series The Rag Trade and has continued to receive accolades for her work as an actress and as a director. Theirs was a long, sometimes turbulent, always passionate relationship, and here Sheila describes their life together - a love that weathered overwork and the pressures of celebrity, drink and cancer, separation and joyful reunions - with honesty and piercing intelligence. Together they bore witness to swiftly changing times - from the Second World War to the Iraq war, from rationing to affluence, from the chiselled tones of Olivier to the democracy of TV. Sheila has kept a diary all her life; her entries charting the course of John's illness, his death, the heartbreak of bereavement, and the beginnings of a new life on her own, stand as an intensely moving memoir of loss and recovery.
The Two of Us is a remarkable book - a. biography of a born actor and the complex man behind the roles, a tender memoir of marriage, and a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present. Full of insight and vivid memories, it evokes two lives lived to the utmost.
apart.
John Thaw was born and brought up in Manchester. His mother ran off when John was seven, and his father, a long-distance lorry driver, was often away, leaving John and his brother to manage alone. Acting was not an obvious choice of career but his timing was perfect: it was the sixties; theatre and TV were hungry for new voices and his natural, intuitive style of acting. With his roles in Z-Cars and The Sweeney, fame came quickly. But in a long and enduringly successful career in theatre and TV, it was John's role as Morse that secured him widespread popular and critical acclaim.
In 1974 John married Sheila Hancock with whom he shared a working-class background, a RADA education and a huge talent for acting - Sheila was already the star of the sixties TV series The Rag Trade and has continued to receive accolades for her work as an actress and as a director. Theirs was a long, sometimes turbulent, always passionate relationship, and here Sheila describes their life together - a love that weathered overwork and the pressures of celebrity, drink and cancer, separation and joyful reunions - with honesty and piercing intelligence. Together they bore witness to swiftly changing times - from the Second World War to the Iraq war, from rationing to affluence, from the chiselled tones of Olivier to the democracy of TV. Sheila has kept a diary all her life; her entries charting the course of John's illness, his death, the heartbreak of bereavement, and the beginnings of a new life on her own, stand as an intensely moving memoir of loss and recovery.
The Two of Us is a remarkable book - a. biography of a born actor and the complex man behind the roles, a tender memoir of marriage, and a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present. Full of insight and vivid memories, it evokes two lives lived to the utmost.