How did one of TV’s best-loved actors end up single, struggling for work and living in a flat in Tyneside?
As star of Ballykissangel, DCI Banks and Drop The Dead Donkey is cleared by a jury of GBH...
I talked to her.’ Tompkinson, an eternal romantic, never saw his love affair with Kirwan as just another on-set fling.
He proposed marriage in Roly’s Bistro in Dublin in July 1997 and Dervla appeared equally smitten, declaring she’d found her ‘Mr Right’. They set up home together in Hampstead, North London but in 1999, even as the builders were renovating it, they split.
They managed to stay on good enough terms, however, to work together on a TV film, The Flint Street Nativity, which started filming five weeks later.
But just over a year after splitting from Dervla, Tompkinson had married someone else. He and interior designer turned publicist Nicci Taylor met by chance at a gentlemen’s outfitters in London’s Savile Row.
They were married in 2001 and have a daughter, Daisy. Soon afterwards, Tompkinson was cast in the ITV drama Wild At Heart, opposite Amanda Holden, which meant filming for four or five months a year in South Africa, a huge wrench for a new husband and father.
Friends of Holden remember how Tompkinson didn’t join in with the rest of the cast and crew who partied in the evenings but instead went back to his hotel room to call his young family.
By this time he had stopped drinking alcohol as well, a decision which was partly influenced by the sudden, unexpected death of his mother in 1995, from pneumonia.
He explained: ‘I used to drink a lot and enjoyed it. But it was becoming a problem. I think age had a lot to do with it. I wasn’t as quick at recovering from the after-effects of drink as I used to be. Also, my mum passed away out of the blue and that could have been an excuse for me to feel sorry for myself and hit the bottle even harder.
‘But that would not have been very respectful to my mum. So one day I decided to stop.’
SADNeSS was heaped upon tragedy when his second marriage ended in 2006, with the couple blaming the actor’s punishing work schedule. True to form, Tompkinson quickly found a new partner, elaine Young, a diplomat, whom — again — he met by chance, in a theatre bar in Glasgow.
She’d asked if he would take a picture of her and her friends. ‘It was just one of those love at first sight things,’ he said.
They set up home together in Surrey and when daughter Daisy was 13, she opted to come and live with them.
‘It’s great having the three of us together,’ he said.
His next project, DCI Banks for ITV was a hit and, crucially, didn’t require months away, filming abroad. Tompkinson felt that all was rosy. In fact, he and elaine were talking marriage after a decade together, when suddenly, bafflingly, they split.
What was to blame this time? Maybe his ‘obsession’ with work: he wouldn’t take a holiday longer than two weeks in case he missed out on roles. But he did say that as he entered middle age he had learned to be less intense in his pursuit of success.
He met his next, and most recent, girlfriend, Jessica Johnson, again by chance. Both were in separate productions at Live Theatre in Newcastle. Ms Johnson, who is originally from Sunderland, told Tompkinson that she thought he would make a brilliant Frank, the Open University professor in educating Rita, and she could be Rita.
By the time that they had put together a touring production, they were an item and were living together in her native North-east. Tompkinson reflected that he knew well enough what washed-up Frank was experiencing.
‘A lot of actors have had glory days and better parts when they were younger,’ he said in 2019. ‘But the wedge gets a bit thinner the older you get, so you see quite a lot of bitter, disappointed people.’
He felt that the power of the show was in the unlikely romance and said: ‘People adore the idea of second chances and that it is never too late.’
How much he must be hoping that is true this week.