My life of regret after leaving my three wives, by TV star Aspel
SMOOTH-talking TV legend Michael Aspel has revealed he is racked with remorse over the failure of his three marriages.
The 90-year-old broadcaster, who presented the celebrity biography programme This Is Your Life and chat show Aspel & Company, said he was ‘full of regrets’ after leaving wives Dian Sessions, TV scriptwriter Ann Reed and actress Elizabeth Power.
‘When I look back at my life it is mostly with disappointment,’ he said in an interview this weekend.
‘Not about my working life, although I do wish I had remained an actor, but my regret is that I left three wives. Sometimes I wake up in the night and sit bolt upright and think, “It was utter madness.”
‘I can’t find excuses. I just felt this awful need to wriggle out of my marriages. To have done it three times must be a flaw in my personality.’
Aspel said he believed his behaviour might stem from his childhood as a wartime evacuee in Somerset. He said: ‘Those formative years made me feel like a loner. So, I felt claustrophobic when I was bound by things I had volunteered for.’
The presenter, whose laid-back interviewing style attracted A-list guests such as Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Taylor and former Beatle Ringo Starr, recalled the drawn-out publicity that dogged the end of his 18-year marriage to EastEnders star Ms Power.
He had begun an affair with his current partner Irene Clarke, a production assistant on This Is Your Life, but in 1994 their relationship leaked to newspapers and he was staked out by photographers at a Manchester hotel. ‘I had to go home and tell Lizzie after Manchester,’ he said. ‘I should have just given an interview [after the press found out]. But it just went on and on.’
Aspel has remained married to Ms Power – ‘never divorced, Lizzie’s a Catholic’ – and insists he gets on ‘extremely well’ with his ex-wives and children, to whom he says he was a good father. He had two sons with his first wife, Ms Sessions, one of whom, Greg, died from cancer aged just 29.
Of his son’s death, he said: ‘The grief is all mixed up in one huge kind of regret. It’s all part of the loss. Some of it is self-inflicted and some of it is just terrible.’
Aspel and Ms Reed had twins before divorcing in 1967, and he and his third wife, Ms Power, had a further two sons. A third died at just three days old. The presenter will be recalling his days as a wartime evacuee in a charity gala, Stars In Salute!, tonight at the Royal Air Force Club in London’s Mayfair. The event, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, will also feature stars such as Sir Ben Kingsley, Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and EastEnders stalwart Pam St Clement.
Aspel, who is patron of the Evacuees Association, said in the interview with The Daily Telegraph: ‘It was four-and-a-half years of one’s childhood. I think about it a lot.’