Early Life
John Nettles was born in St Austell, Cornwall in 1943. He was adopted at birth by a carpenter Eric Nettles and his wife Elsie and he attended the local grammar school in St Austell. When he was seven years old he learned that his birth mother was a Roman Catholic Irish nurse who had been working in England during World War II. She was placed into a mental institution after illegitimately giving birth and died of tuberculosis aged 28. Nettles has never discovered the identity of his father, but did discover he has a brother and two sisters.
In 1962, Nettles won a scholarship and studied history and philosophy at the University of Southampton. At Southampton he first performed and, having found he liked acting, he was given several amateur parts.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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