Richard and his daughter Lucy (Image: NA)
He worked extremely hard and he kept hours that were not conducive to young kids so the quality time we got to spend with him in our early childhood was during holidays.
We used to holiday in Cornwall and I have very happy memories of those times.
He was just very focused on us and wanting to play all the time and was very funny and fun to be with. My sister, Kate, was born in 1963, just as Marriage Lines ended, which was the first TV series that got my father well known.
Then, when I was born in 1967, he was always recognised in the streets.
So that was our life. That was our dad. The way my father dealt with his fame was so grounded and self-deprecating that it never felt like something extraordinary or special or unusual to us. It was just that my dad was on that box in the living room and so people said “hello” to him in the street.
We loved to watch him on The Good Life and The Other One, with Michael Gambon. That was a sitcom about these two rather lonely men and it became a family joke because I always used to burst into tears at the end. I always enjoyed watching him and I’ve got what I call “my Dad cupboard” now, which is pretty much everything he ever did that I could get on DVD.
I am very, very fortunate that every so often I think, “Ooh, I’d just love to see my dad” and I can go upstairs and watch him. As a dad, he was just very much someone you relied on and you could call up. You knew that he was in your corner. He was very good at giving advice and instinctive about what to do in a situation.
And 99 per cent of the time he was always right. He was very liberal – good cop while my poor mum, who was doing the day-to-day stuff, had to be bad cop. He really didn’t want me to be an actor though.
In fact, he was very adamant that I shouldn’t be. He wanted me to be a lawyer and in a profession that wouldn’t let you down or be fickle, because it is an incredibly difficult profession to be in, and more so if you’re a woman.
‘He worked extremely hard’ (Image: GETTY)
But when I was in my mid-teens, I used to sit in the wings of a Saturday matinee to watch him in a show, which I loved. He shouldn’t have allowed me, because that gives you the absolute drug. You’re sitting in the wings of a West End theatre thinking, “I have to be an actor”.
It’s so intoxicating. He has inspired me in terms of his work ethic and the career choices that he made. He constantly challenged himself as an actor. He took chances and he never sat around in a comfort zone. Some people would have gone, “I don’t want to play Malvolio. That’s a bit scary.”
But he was hungry to keep challenging himself and he was very versatile. Because I went into the same industry, I found it incredibly useful to be able to call him up and ask his advice about a job or rehearsals or a script.
My relationship with him graduated into two friends talking about work, as much as a father and a daughter. That was a lovely part of our relationship later on in my life. My father was also a prolific swearer and he had a brilliant self-deprecation about him and quite a dark sense of humour.
There is that darker element to people who are good comedians. You have to have that to understand how to laugh at life and the world. It’s so funny when I get asked if we had a very showbiz life. If only! There was no showbizzy glitter to our lives at all.
He was always recognised in the streets (Image: GETTY)
Yes, we would sometimes go to press nights but our dad wasn’t Robert Redford. When I look back on my childhood I do have a real sense of security.
We even lived in the same house my entire childhood. My mother still lives in the same house they bought when I was four months old, and I’m 51 now. The fact that their marriage survived through the whole showbusiness thing – that’s quite an achievement, as well.
There was so much more to my father as an actor than The Good Life and we wanted an authorised biography that showed that he also played Hamlet – and later Polonious in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet.
He also did Ionesco’s absurdist play The Chairs on Broadway. I felt it was important to honour him and his memory. I love the book and I’ve read it twice. He was 65 when he gave up smoking and he was diagnosed with emphysema years later.
He was very angry with himself. Of course, you would be when you’ve got the news that you’ve got a terminal illness that you could have avoided. He was stoical about it but he didn’t do anything to help himself.
He didn’t do any of the physiotherapy and my mum and my sister and I nagged him and then we gave up and went,
“We will just have to respect that this is how he’s going to handle it.”
It was very sad to hear him say, “OK, I’ve done this to myself and therefore I’m going to take the consequences.”
He worked right up until four months before he died. He kept going. My mum always said that when he was working he came back looking 10 years younger and well. My father was a very entertaining and funny man, and he would spread so much laughter.
The cruellest thing for us to watch was that the illness meant that he couldn’t really talk very much. He also couldn’t laugh because it made him cough.
It was a cruel fate that a man who had spread so much laughter and joy in his life ended up not being able to laugh. I miss him every day. In the first couple of years I would think, “Oh, I must give Dad a call”. Time heals but I’m never going to stop missing him.
More Than Just A Good Life by James Hogg (Little, Brown Book Group, £20)