Personal Life
Attenborough's father was the principal of University College, Leicester, now the city's university. This has resulted in a long association with the university, with Richard becoming a patron. The university's Embrace Arts at the RA centre, which opened in 1997 is named in his honour. He has two younger brothers: naturalist and broadcaster David; and John (died 2012), who had made a career in the motor trade.
Attenborough has been married to English actress Sheila Sim since 1945. From 1949 until October 2012, they have lived in Beaver Lodge on Richmond Green in London. The house was sold in October 2012 for £11.5 million, owing to the couple's deteriorating health.
On 26 December 2004, the couple's elder daughter, 49-year-old Jane Holland, as well as her mother-in-law, also named Jane and Attenborough's 15-year-old granddaughter Lucy, were killed when a tsunami caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake struck Khao Lak, Thailand where they were holidaying. A service was held on 8 March 2005 and Attenborough read a lesson at the national memorial service on 11 May 2005. His grandson Samuel Holland, who survived the tsunami uninjured and granddaughter Alice Holland, who suffered severe leg injuries, also read in the service. A commemorative plaque was placed in the floor of St. Mary Magdalen's parish church in Richmond. Attenborough later described the Boxing Day of 2004 as "the worst day of my life". Attenborough has two other children, Michael and Charlotte, an actress. Michael is a theatre director and the Artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in London and is married to actress Karen Lewis; they have two sons. Charlotte has three children.
Attenborough collected Picasso ceramics from the 1950s. More than 100 items went on display at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester in 2007, in an exhibition dedicated to family members lost in the tsunami.
In 2008 he published, in association with his long standing associate Diana Hawkins, an informal autobiography Entirely Up to You, Darling, in which he states that he is a lifelong Labour Party supporter.
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“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
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