Old Rage: 'One of our best-loved actor's powerful riposte to a world driving her mad’ - DAILY MAIL

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uk will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing. It’s 20 years now since Hancock’s second husband, John Thaw, died of oesophageal cancer – the same disease that took her first, the actor Alec Ross, 31 years earlier – and I wonder if the isolation born of Covid-19 painfully reinforced the state of widowhood. View image in fullscreen Hancock with daughters (l-r) Melanie, Joanna and Abigail at the memorial service for John Thaw at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, 2002. Funny, feisty, honest, she makes for brilliant company as she talks about her life as a daughter, a sister, a mother, a widow, an actor, a friend and looks at a world so different from the wartime world of her childhood. Today is particularly piercing on this score, the death of Denis Waterman, Thaw’s co-star in The Sweeney, having just been announced.

This book however is like a diary, where Sheila has mixed what has happened within that year and flips back to her past younger years of what happened. Hancock, who kept wondering why the producers hadn’t cast Judi Dench until she found herself lying in a freezing cold sleeping bag 2,000 feet up on the side of a mountain, believes she is the oldest person ever to have done this – though as she admits in Old Rage, the short flight in the helicopter that retrieved her from the summit was, in the end, far more terrifying than the climb. I think I know the answer to this question, but her relish is so enjoyable, I want to be the perfect audience.

Whilst I’m sure she’s a very nice lady to be commended for her many and varied accomplishments including mountain climbing aged 83, raising 3 daughters whilst maintaining a career and a marriage to an alcoholic but the incessant opinionated ranting and disparaging remarks about public figures she doesn’t approve of or like is tiresome. Growing up as the horrors of WWII unravelled, getting a job in Paris at 14, hitchhiking around Europe with a friend at 16, climbing a mountain at 84. Its pages would, she hoped, describe fulfilment and contentment as well as how best to keep your aching back straight (believe me when I tell you that her spine would induce awe in even the sternest pilates teacher). I didn't get any of the humour that Hancock usually has when being interviewed or in her previous books. Sheila Hancock, one of Britain's most highly regarded and popular actors, received a Damehood for services to drama and charity in 2021.

I wish I wasn’t obsessionally work-oriented; that I didn’t feel guilty when I don’t work, or that my life is over.Let’s just say that Boris Johnson and some of his cronies, along with Trump, were not, and never will be, on her Christmas card list. Have to say I skipped through some of her real rants but being an avid reader, I have never given up on a book in my 73 years. She remembers the war, she has direct memory of how people behaved and cause that we, as a human condition, caused one another and how long it took to rebuild bridges.

The last night of Sweeney Todd… [Hancock played Mrs Lovett in the original West End production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical in 1980] I’m ashamed I didn’t enjoy it: the audience going wild; me having to tell them to shut up, because I couldn’t hear the band, and I needed to make my pies in time to it. However, her enquiring mind never ceases to scrutinise the after-effects of Covid-19 and Brexit while politics tops the list with shoddy government, weak politicians, inept prime ministers, poor decision making, and lack of support for the education system.I enjoyed this, although I'm not a fan of celebrity autobiography, which is often very self indulgent. I would have preferred more about her as a person and her life and career, but maybe she’s done that in her previous books.