The lonely death of Tony Hancock, thousands of miles from home, was far removed from the life he had lived entertaining theatres full of laughing fans. Cut off from the woman he adored by a cruelly coincidental postal strike that meant their love letters were delayed, he read in the press of her denial of their love and decided to take his own life in a dismal apartment in Sydney, Australia.
At only 44, he had risen to great heights but his addiction to alcohol had driven him into a deep depression. Hancock's comedy genius is as well documented as his eventual downfall. Consumed by fear of failure and a need for booze, his life tumbled out of control. But it was not only drink that turned his life upside-down, as a new BBC drama-documentary shows.
A well-known ladies' man, Hancock had also managed to embroil himself in a complicated love triangle, having a passionate affair with the wife of one of his closest friends, actor John Le Mesurier, who was later to find wide fame as Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army
Joan Le Mesurier said the attraction, when she first met Hancock in 1965, had been instant: "I had been married before but this was the first time I had been head over heels in love."
To this day the front of her house in Ramsgate bears testament to her bizarre love triangle. It sports two blue plaques presented by the Dead Comics Society, commemorating the comedians who once lived there. Bizarrely, Le Mesurier gave the adulterous couple his blessing and, years later, when Joan had returned to the marital home, he would jokingly refer to her affair as "when you went AWOL darling". "John was a lovely man," Joan said, "a gentleman, but he was not exactly passionate. He wouldn't tell me he loved me. He would pat me on the head and say, 'I'm awfully fond of you, my little friend.'
"Tony was different. He swept me off my feet. I was in love with Tony, so the physical side of our relationship was good. We were caught up in the madness of being in love."
With this passion came Hancock's other love — alcohol. Joan recalls many a morning after the night before, sat by his hospital bed. On the worst occasion he downed a bottle of cognac in five minutes and passed out.
"When he came round the doctor asked: 'Do you want to die, Mr Hancock?' and he said 'Yes'," Joan recalled. "I was really hurt by that."
John Le Mesurier met Joan Malin when she was working at The Establishment, Peter Cook's satire club. John's wife, Hattie Jacques, had recently left him and he was "desperately unhappy".
"He was helpless. He couldn't even boil an egg. Once when I was ill he tried to make me a cup of tea and he put the tea straight into the kettle."
Six months into their marriage Tony Hancock asked Le Mesurier if he could come and stay at their London home. Hancock was ill and Le Mesurier knew his young wife would take care of him. "Tony had not been eating. He was skinny and ill," Joan recalled, "so I nursed him and fed him and he would follow me around the flat in John's dressing gown."
Little did John know at the time but it was not only his home he would share. While he was working in Paris, a romance blossomed between his guest and his wife.
"It was mutual," Joan, now 76, insisted. "Well, he made the first pass and I told him to stop because I knew I was falling for him but he became so romantic, saying he wanted to marry me, give me babies, move to the country."
To his credit, Hancock refused to keep the affair secret, insisting they inform John of their deceit.
"I didn't want to tell him but Tony insisted. He said 'We can't sneak about.' We told John when he got back from Paris. He was very good about it; said he quite understood. I think he did. He was very fond of Tony, you see."
So fond, in fact, that when his wife left the marital home to live with Tony, Le Mesurier would call to check on how she was. Having been Hancock's friend for years, he knew only too well the sorry story of Hancock's first two wives.
In 1950 Hancock married model Cicely Romanis. It was a stormy relationship. Hancock would become violent through drink but Cicely, trained in martial arts, could fight him off. She could not win the psychological battles, though, and turned to drink herself,
His second wife Freddie Ross, from whom he was estranged at the time of his affair with Joan, suffered similarly. She tried to commit suicide in 1968
To this day relations between the two women are frosty. "Why doesn't Joan do a film about her life with John Le Mesurier?" Ross seethed, on hearing of the BBC film. "She lived with him a lot longer than with Tony. You almost have to feel sorry for her. She has nothing else in her life but this project."
Joan's two year on-and-off affair with Hancock clearly made a huge impression on her life and, like his wives before her, she too tried to control his drinking.
"At first I was very naive about his alcoholism but I soon learned to read the signs," Joan said. "When he was supposed to be drying out he was very cunning and deceitful. Once he said he was going to join the library at seven at night!"
Although insistent that Hancock was never violent with her, she admits he once warned her. "You should leave me because I might do some damage. I might kill you."
Hancock could turn on her without warning, she said "Sometimes he would go for a month without drinking, then slump into depression. I would smell beer on his breath; that was how it would start. One sniff of beer and he would end up on brandy and become monstrous. I poured a bottle down the sink one night and he was outraged. He was nasty when I tried to stop him."
He would abuse Joan with ranting tirades which came to a head one evening with her elderly parents, who were in awe of the comedy legend their daughetr had taken up with. That night, Hancock did the unthinkable, calling her mother a foul four-letter word and alienating her family for good. The next morning he remembered nothing of it.
By this stage he was deteriorating rapidly. Hancock had left school at 15 and first found fame with 1951 ventiloquist show Educating Archie, followed by appearances on the BBC prolramme Kaleidoscope. Eventually he was given his own BBC radio show Hancock's Half Hour, which ran for five years and was co-written with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. It co-starred Sid James, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams but with his personal life in turmoil Hancock became paranoid about his success. Fearful of becoming known as a double act, he began to sack his co-writers. He suffered "terrible self-doubt".
"He couldn't handle the fame," Joan explained. "He wanted stardom but was a very shy man and needed alcohol to give him confidence. He felt his career was on the skids at this stage, which I suppose it was."
After another blazing row, Joan again ran back to her understanding husband. And the tragedy that then unfolded has haunted the rest of her life. In March 1968 Hancock had gone to make a television series, Hancock Down Under, in Australia but a postal strike meant Joan's letters to him never arrived.
"The series was not going well and on thr night before he died he read a quote from me in the press," she said. :Freddie had named me in their divorce and the press had doorstepped me. To get them off the scent, I said my affair with Tony was over. It had been a fling and I was happy with my husband John."
This news tipped the already unstable Hancock over the edge.
"Tony read that and tried to ring me. I was in Rome so he rang his mother instread. She rang my mother, who said I never wanted to see Tony again. This got back to him and he took the pills. I got a letter from him which arrived after he died. It said "You never loved me enough. I relinquish you."
On the night of June 25, 1968, with an overdose of tablets, Hancock relinquished his grasp on life.
International Express - by Helen Dowd