Love story goes on as Strop gets Parkinson’s
“INSIDE he’s the same old Corny — he just can’t articulate it as well.”
They married beneath a 100-year-old pear tree on the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1978, promising to love each other for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Forty-two years later the love story of John Cornell and Delvene Delaney continues, the couple’s vows meaning more than ever as Cornell, 79, battles Parkinson’s disease.
Or as Cornell’s long-time best mate Paul Hogan — who played cupid to the couple all those years ago — puts it: “Corny and Dellie are rock solid, always have been.”
“Delvene has been there through thick and thin with John,” Hogan says from his home in Los Angeles. “Well it’s got very thin, and she’s still there, by his side, as always.
“We keep in touch a lot. She constantly lets me know what’s going on — some days
John can’t really talk on the phone, so she’s like the conduit from him to me, and me to him, and he knows I’m there for him, always.”
For her part Delaney, 69, who fell in love with Cornell when she appeared on The Paul Hogan Show during the 1970s, caring for the man who managed Hogan’s career for decades and co-wrote Crocodile Dundee is “easy”.
“I don’t mean there haven’t been difficult moments, but John is probably the bravest man I know,” Delaney says.
“He never complains, he never asks ‘why me?’, and he’s always trying to make sure other people are all right.”
Delaney says that after Cornell initially gained much of his mobility back after undergoing a procedure known as “deep brain stimulation” at a Brisbane hospital in 2010, the challenge for the businessman is “communication”.
“John can still speak, but it’s not easy for him to communicate the way he once did.
“So I think sometimes people might be reluctant to call, because they don’t want to appear rude or impatient with him if they can’t understand what he is saying.”
As for Delaney, she says she understands Cornell “perfectly” — but then again, she always has.
Theirs is a love story for the ages, with Hogan recently telling the podcast Evenin’ Viewers that, the moment he met Delaney, he knew she was just the girl for his best mate.
“I remember saying to Corny ‘I’ve just found a winner for you, son’.
“I’d met Dellie and she was funny and smart and easy going and I thought ‘I can see Corny falling in love with this lady’.
“And he did, and she did, and they still are — so there you go, I was better at matchmaking for them than I am for myself,” Hogan chuckles.
The couple have two daughters. One of the reasons for their personal success is that they have always eschewed a showbiz lifestyle.
Even at the height of their fame, when Delaney was a regular on The Paul Hogan Show, as was Cornell, playing Hoges’s gormless offsider Strop, they avoided the limelight. Their 1978 wedding took place, Delaney laughs, “in a paddock, which is very us”.
“We married on my sister’s property, in secret, with just 11 guests,” Delaney — who made her own wedding dress — reveals.
“It was a beautiful place, but my sister and her husband were very self-sufficient and were trying to live a simpler lifestyle, so it had no electricity, no running water, and we spent our wedding night in a tent,” she giggles.
Cornell, Hogan says, fell hard for Delaney, just as she now says she fell hard for him.
“We lived together for three years before he proposed at a restaurant where we had ordered quail.
“John asked me to marry him, so I saved the wishbone, we broke it in half, and then I had both halves dipped in copper, then silver, then gold, because gold doesn’t adhere to bone, and then I put them on matching necklaces.”
Delaney and Cornell still wear the necklaces all these years later — still bound together, still making wishes.
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