SirTom quits £6.5m mansion in Los Angeles to come home
HE MAY be a proud Welshman, but for years Sir Tom Jones and his wife Linda made their home in Los Angeles.
However, The Voice UK judge has now sold his £6.5m LA mansion as he can’t face living there without his beloved late wife, who died from lung cancer in 2016.
Tom, 77, says the memories were so raw after her death that he had to sell the home they shared. He left all the furniture and fittings for the new owner when he moved back to the UK.
“I’m back in the UK permanently now because my wife passed away in 2016,” he told Mirror Online.
“So that was our house in LA. I didn’t feel comfortable there any more.”
The fixtures and fittings were included in the £6.5m price tag
The It’s Not Unusual singer was forced to leave his wife at home while he toured due to her ill-health.
“She wanted to come back to Britain, she was always homesick,” said Tom.
“Then she got sick and we couldn’t do it. She told me to go back the last week she was alive. She told me to get a flat in London.
“She would have loved to have come back, but we left it too late.”
Tom added: “She decorated the whole place [in LA] so apart from the photographs and some artwork, the man who bought it wanted the whole thing, furniture and everything, which was great for me because I wouldn’t have been able to put all that stuff into a flat.”
Tom and Linda – whose full name was Lady Melinda Rose Woodward – were childhood sweethearts who wed at Pontypridd Register Office when they were just 16.
They had been married for 59 years when she died, and they had one son, Mark, who was born shortly after their wedding.
She died at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in April 2016, with Sir Tom and her loved ones by her side.
Following her death, Sir Tom admitted that he dreamt about his late wife and woke up feeling broken-hearted that she was no longer at his side.
And while he had said he didn’t know whether or not he would be able to sing without her, he later admitted that singing had “saved” him.
Just weeks after Linda passed away, he appeared at the Hay Festival, where he told the audience: “She liked most of my songs. She loved It’s Not Unusual, because that’s what changed everything for us.
“But there was this one song, It Looks Like I’m Never Going to Fall in Love Again. She loved it.
“I only had one acetate from the recording and she didn’t let it out of her sight.
“She played it for [manager] Gordon Mills’ wife who wanted to take it home for that night. And Linda said, ‘You can’t have it, it’s mine!’
“She was a determined woman. I felt very lucky to have her. We fell in love, not in lust, from a young age. We knew that it would be forever – for as long as we were alive.”
Sir Tom was back on TV screens this weekend as The Voice UK returned for a new series – his first job after having undergone a hip replacement operation.
But he is now back to normal and says his health is “great”, although he has lost some of his famous moves.
He added: “I’m walking like nothing ever happened.
“I can still dance on stage. The gyration – that’s got nothing to do with the leg, that’s something to do with age. I’m not moving like I used to.”