Personal Life and Death
He married Patricia Brown in 1955; they had three children, Amanda, Timothy and Piers.
Nimmo's hobbies included gardening and collecting walnut furniture, porcelain and paintings. He was also a wine expert and wrote several books on the subject as well as a number of books on the theatre. Another interest was after dinner speaking, for which he was always in demand.
He received many awards, including the 1990 Benedictine After Dinner Speaker of the Year. He was made a Freeman of the City of London, and the University of Leicester recognised his contribution to entertainment with an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1996.
In December 1998, Nimmo attended a National Treasures celebrity lunch in the boardroom of the Daily Express newspaper along with Sir Peter O'Sullevan, Joan Collins, Dame Beryl Bainbridge, Dickie Davis and Sue MacGregor amongst others. He had recently returned from a Middle East tour of Run For Your Wife and was in sparkling form. After lunch he asked to be driven to the Garrick Club for further refreshment, and then returned to his Kensington home. He and his wife later went out to dinner. On their return, Nimmo was checking an external alarm when he lost his footing and fell down a stone staircase into the basement. He suffered head injuries and was rushed to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital where he remained in a coma until his death in February 1999.
He is buried in the churchyard at Easton Maudit, a small rural village in Northamptonshire where he kept a home.
Read more about this topic: Derek Nimmo
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“I have lifted the veil. I have created life, wrested the secret of life from life. Now do you understand? From the lives of those who have gone before, I have created life.”
—Edward T. Lowe, and Frank Strayer. Dr. von Niemann (Lionel Atwill)
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)