Personal Life
In 1964, Thaw married Sally Alexander (a theatre stage manager), but they divorced four years later. He met actress Sheila Hancock in 1969 on the set of a London comedy So What About Love?. She was married to fellow actor Alexander "Alec" Ross, and after Thaw professed his love to Hancock, she told him that she would not have an affair. After the death of her husband (from oesophageal cancer) in 1971, Thaw and Hancock married on 24 December 1973 in Cirencester, and he remained with her until his death in 2002 (also from oesophageal cancer).
Thaw had three daughters (all of whom are actresses): Abigail "Abs" Thaw from his first marriage, Joanna "Jo" Thaw from his second, and he also adopted Sheila Hancock's daughter Melanie Jane "Ellie" from her first marriage. Melanie legally changed her name from Ross to Thaw.
Thaw was a committed socialist and a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party. Thaw was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in March 1993 by Queen Elizabeth II. In September 2006, Thaw was voted by the general public as number 3, after David Jason and Morecambe and Wise, in a poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars for the past 50 years.
Read more about this topic: John Thaw
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“What stunned me was the regular assertion that feminists were “anti-family.” . . . It was motherhood that got me into the movement in the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women’s movement that put self-esteem back into “just a housewife,” rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of “instinct” and making it human, deliberate, powerful.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)