The daughter The who broke my heart
Minder star George Cole reveals his anguish over the daughter who’s turned her back on him for 46 years
GEORGE Cole drives to meet me in his X-type Jaguar — the make favoured by his most famous TV character, the socially ambitious but shady wheeler-dealer Arthur Daley. He is also wearing a brown trilby and cashmere overcoat, which is Arthur’s trademark attire. Indeed, so striking is the resemblance between George and his alter ego, I almost greet him as Mr Daley.
When I remark on the similarities, he beams. ‘This is Arthur’s trilby: one of the originals, from the TV series,’ he says. ‘The overcoat was his, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the jacket was, too.’
He peers at the label of the natty pin-stripe — hand-stitched, bespoke, from a now-defunct tailor — and concludes that it probably was.
George, 88, played Daley in Minder for 15 years from 1979. The ITV series — which also featured Dennis Waterman as Terry McCann for the first ten years — ran for 106 episodes and, at its peak, attracted 17.5 million viewers.
Arthur’s London argot — his malapropisms; his catchphrases — crept into common parlance: ‘’er indoors’, the term he used to describe his formidable, but never visible wife, even got into the Oxford English Dictionary.
A bit of Arthur, it seems, percolated into George’s life. He is now onto his eighth Jaguar and — as hi s appearance today attests — he’s also adopted Daley’s punctilious dress sense. He bought several Savile Row suits, plus coats and hats, from the TV wardrobe department when the show ended in 1994.
Some of George’s preferences infiltrated his screen persona, too: Arthur started smoking Havana cigars because George had a four-aday habit. (He abandoned it entirely, however, in 2002 when one of his heart valves packed up and he had a pig’s valve and pacemaker inserted.)
And because George deplores swearing, Arthur and Terry cleaned up their language. Even ‘damn’ was excised from later episodes.
The series was originally intended as a vehicle for Waterman after his success in The Sweeney. And George, it emerges, was not Waterman’s first choice to play Daley.
He wanted Denholm Elliott, but was over- r uled by t he show’s executives, so there was a frisson of unspoken tension at the start of filming. ‘We circled round each other for three or four days,’ recalls George. However, they soon became so friendly they dispensed with separate trailers and decided to share one.
Today, George counts Dennis among his closest friends, although he did disapprove of Waterman’s affair with actress Rula Lenska.
George loved playing the disreputable Daley — his favourite role — and he misses him ‘terribly’. But he concedes he was a deplorable character.
‘I’ve earned a few sovs from him over the years, so I shouldn’t complain, but he was a rogue; a dreadful character, really. I’d certainly lock up the silver if he was coming to dinner,’ he says.
However, George believes he could not be successfully reprised for today’s viewers.
‘The climate is wrong,’ he says. ‘He was a product of Thatcherism; an entrepreneur, and he had photos of the Queen and Mrs Thatcher on his wall. But I couldn’t see him having Cameron there. Could you?’
Indeed, Arthur Daley would certainly not have the same reverence for the today’s PM as for the Iron Lady.
There are, of course, many qualities that Daley does not share with George: rectitude, charm and a cultured accent among them. He also has an appealing — and very unactorly — modesty.
HE GREW up on a South London council estate and his route into the thespian middle classes was punctuated by drama, rejection, good fortune and emotional upheaval.
Today, he lives near Henley- onThames in rural Oxfordshire with his adored second wife, actress Penny Morrell, 75, to whom he has been happily married for 46 years. They have a daughter Tara, 44, a son Toby, 42, and three grandchildren.
He writes about them all in his newly published autobiography The World Was My Lobster, which also tells the story of his illegitimacy, his adoption by loving working-class parents — and the advert he spotted as a 14-year-old school leaver for a ‘small boy’ to take a part in a London musical, which led to his acting career.
What i s conspicuously scant, however, i s mention of his first marriage, in 1954, to actress Eileen Moore — this is dispatched in a paragraph — and their two children, Crispin and Harriet. The marriage ended when Eileen ran off in 1962 with her hairdresser.
George sued for custody of his young children, won and raised them both as a single father — rare today, but virtually unheard of in the Sixties — for four years.
Then, after he married Penny, the children both opted to go back to their mother. Harriet has remained obdurately estranged from her father ever since. However, Crispin, a successful scriptwriter, is happily back in the family fold.
THE break-up of his first marriage, George writes, was ‘heartbreaking for all concerned, especially for the two children’, and that the circumstances are ‘all very personal and private and have no place in a book that sets out to chronicle pride, joy and happiness’.
When we meet, though, he is more forthcoming. I remark that it must have been horrendously difficult for him — working constantly as he was — coping with the disintegration of a marriage and lone parenthood.
His concerns were principally for his children. ‘I was father, mother and reader of Wind In The Willows to them,’ he smiles. ‘I remember taking them to school, and they were on the verge of tears all the time.
‘I suddenly realised that getting them up, giving them breakfast and rushing them off was no good. The thing to do was to get up much, much earlier and settle them first by reading them a story, which I did.
‘And what really broke my heart was the day we walked to school — one of their hands in each of mine — and they said: “Daddy, have you noticed, we’re not crying today?” And then I realised the terribly unsettling effect the whole thing had had on them.’
He met Penny in 1966 while holding auditions at the New Arts Theatre in London, and fell in love with her instantly. He was late arriving; he’d jammed a teaspoon in the dishwasher door and flooded the kitchen.
Penny thought he looked ‘thin and pale’; he was skipping lunch, working flat- out, while also fulfilling his domestic and parental duties.
She wondered idly what ‘Mrs Cole’ thought of all this, and was told there wasn’t one. George invited Penny to dinner — they had lobster followed by rice pudding — and the romance began. Penny started to help with the children. ‘But everything was proper,’ he recalls. ‘ Penny would al ways drive back to her home at night.
‘We both felt it would be inappropriate for her to stay, because the children were with me,’ he says. ‘But eventually I said: “This is silly, this going back every night. Will you marry me?” She fled in her MG, came back half an hour or so later and said: “Yes!”.’
It is difficult to overstate the sense
of loss George must have felt when, after he and Penny married in 1967, the children decided to return to their mother. Crispin was 12, Harriet, 16; he hasn’t seen his daughter since. ‘I think she felt she had to choose between her mum and Penny, but I didn’t impose that choice on her,’ he says.
‘Initially there was great sorrow, but it’s been 46 years now and it’s too long ago to feel rancour.’
Would he welcome her now if she sought a rapprochement? He ponders this. ‘It’s such a long time,’ he says. ‘I’ve offered her so many olive branches, but she’s hit me with them. It would be difficult, I think, complicated . . .’
George’s son Crispin and his s econd wife, American- born Christine, are, however, very much part of the family again.
But the desertion of first a wife, and then a daughter, followed another significant abandonment in George’s life. He was born, in 1925, the product of an extra-marital liaison between a hotel manager and his 16-year-old employee.
They brokered his adoption — at ten days old — by a man named George Cole, a council manual worker, and his wife Florence, a cleaner. The Coles clearly loved him and George, an only child, reciprocated. He did not learn about his origins until he stumbled across his adoption papers while rummaging for hidden Christmas presents on top of a wardrobe when he was 13. ‘I remember crying,’ he says. ‘I asked my mother about it and there was no great drama. She just told me the truth. But she also told me not to tell anyone I was adopted. I remember thinking that she ought to be proud that she’d given me such a wonderful home.’
George never tried to find his biological parents. ‘I didn’t see why I should go searching; t hey obviously didn’t want me. I was a burden, a nuisance,’ he says, ‘and I was happy and settled with two very nice parents.’
He left school at 14, and would have become a butcher’s errand boy had he not spotted a newspaper advert seeking ‘a small boy’ for a London musical. He didn’t get the part but was offered an understudy’s role in a musical comedy.
Leaving immediately, for Blackpool, he sent a sixpenny telegram to his parents informing them: ‘Gone on stage. Will write’.
He didn’t see them again for six months, but he sent them five shillings from his pay each week, which they returned in the form of parcels of sweets and cakes.
The course of his future career was set. Then in 1940, when he was 15, and playing a Cockney evacuee in a play called Cottage To Let, he met the actor Alastair Sim, who had a formative and enduring influence on him. Sim, then 40, and his young wife Naomi, informally adopted George, who went to live with them in the relative safety of their Oxfordshire home while bombs were raining on London.
Their tenure as proxy parents persisted until their deaths; indeed, in 1954, George had a house built next door to theirs, in which he and Penny still live.
George was mentored by Sim, and encouraged to lose his London accent — he considers himself blessed to have been his protégé.
A RECENT unofficial biography of Sim insinuated — without proof or foundation — that a more sinister motive underpinned Sim’s interest in the young actors he cultivated. George was appalled by it. ‘I thought it was awful. There wasn’t a shred of evidence of anything improper. Alastair and Naomi treated me like their son.’
Sim and Cole went on to star in the St Trinian’s films — Sim as the batty headmistress of the fictional girls’ school, Cole as the lovable rogue, Flash Harry, who, in many ways, was a prototype for Minder’s Arthur Daley.
While George is a mild man; courteous and anxious — in an old school, gentlemanly way, he admits he deplored the 2009 re-make of Minder (starring Shane Richie as Archie Daley). ‘ Appalling,’ says George, before he can censor himself.
‘And it irked me that neither Dennis nor I were asked to give any input — until it was time to promote it.’ ( At which point they declined).
He has not, he insists, retired, although some of the parts that have come his way l ately have offended his values. He was offered a role in the play Barking In Essex, currently showing in the West End, and he declined.
‘When I saw the swear words in the script, I knew I couldn’t do it,’ he says.
Minder, i n contrast, belongs to a gentler era: even his grandchildren Harry, six, Amelia, four, and Thomas, two, watch its re-runs on ITV4. His pleasures are family-orientated ones, and even as he nears his 90th birthday, romance persists in his marriage.
‘We are still very affectionate,’ he says. ‘This year Penny’s Valentine card to me bore the message, “All we can ever do is look after each other”. Then she wrote that she blessed the day I was born.’
George is not a man given to outward displays of emotion, but I think I detect the makings of a tear in his eye.
Having endured rejection, he values familial closeness.
He belongs to a resilient world, of stoicism and stiff upper lips.
However, it is no surprise at all that he f ears the prospect of Penny’s death f ar more t han his own.
When he leaves the hotel where we’ve spent a happy three hours chatting, he realises he’s left his walking stick in the car. I take his hand and we walk down the steps, along the gravel drive, to his Jag.
‘It’s fairly selfish, I know, but I’d hate Penny to go before me,’ he says as he leaves. ‘The truth is I don’t think I could possibly cope without her.’