Sir Tom Jones was married to Linda for 59 years until her tragic death in 2016. Linda, short for Melinda, died aged 75 in Los Angeles after a short battle with lung cancer. She and Tom were childhood sweethearts who married young and went on to have a son together. After Tom Jones exploded onto the music scene in 1965, his good looks and sexually-charged performances soon sent droves of fans his way.
He was regularly unfaithful, bedding up to 250 women a year at the height of his fame.
Despite his constant philanderings, Tom described Linda “as the love of my life” and it feels she felt the same way.
She previously said around Tom’s early fame: ‘I feel alive when he comes through the door, whatever the time of day or night is.”
Apart from that, the blonde-haired reclusive rarely said a word about her long-term love.
But the couple, who met as teenagers, continued to enjoy each other’s company as Linda stayed out of the spotlight.
She would stay at home in their LA mansion while Tom toured abroad.
In fact, Linda was absent from Buckingham Palace when Tom collected his knighthood in 2006.
Tom Jones’s biographer Sean Smith told the Daily Mail in 2015: “They have been married for more than 50 years, but probably have only spent ten years in each other’s company.”
What did Tom Jones say about Linda after her death?
Following Linda’s death, Tom told interview Dylan Jones at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, Linda’s death had been the “hardest thing” he had ever experienced while sharing some lighter moments from their relationship.
He said: “She was always very important to me, she was such a natural person and Welsh, and we grew up together.
“Our sense of humour was the same, we came from the same town.
“She’s always been very important to me, throughout my life, now I realise she might be the most important thing in my life.
“I realise even more now how important she was to me, she still is.
“No. No it was solid, a solid marriage that nothing could shake. That’s how it was.
“I felt very lucky to have fallen in love at an early age, when we were teenagers, and we fell in love, not just in lust.
“A lot of teenagers do fall in lust, and it doesn’t last.
“We both knew this was forever, we both knew for as long as we’d be alive.”