Is there life after Morse?

By BRIAN VINER

On June 20, the front pages of Britain's newspapers were dominated by a report on how alleged incompetence by the rail network had cost 31 lives and a warning from Russian premier Vladimir Putin about the arms race. But the Sun had a more arresting front-page splash: "Morse Fights Cancer".

Diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, the 59-year-old alter ego of TV's Inspector Morse has since kept an understandably low profile. Last week, however, he released a short statement, saying, "I am getting through the worst of it, and look forward to getting back to work."

We can only guess at the pain, both physical and emotional, that this simple statement conceals. But we do know that Thaw, son of a lorry driver from Burnage, the Manchester suburb that also spat out the Gallagher brothers, is a tough cookie. And that his wife of 28 years, Sheila Hancock, could hardly be more empathetic, having survived breast cancer. She quit her role in EastEnders to nurse him.

There is another link, too: John Thaw senior continues, nearly five years after his death from cancer, to influence his elder son's career. "When I am offered a part, I am more likely to do it if I think he has certain qualities that remind me of the old man," Thaw said recently.

His mother walked out on the family - Thaw, his father, and his brother, Ray - when he was 7, to live with another man. Ray Thaw, who lives in Brisbane, has no doubt that his beloved brother's personality was formed by their mother's abrupt departure. They never saw her again.

"And it made him very tough on the outside," Ray tells me. "He decided nobody was going to harm us again."

For Hancock, the event, which Thaw calls "the awfulness", has a different significance. "To trust women has been difficult for him," she says.

Thaw has always been the antithesis of the actor-luvvie cliche, yet the embodiment of another one, the Billy Elliot cliche of the blunt working-class northerner finding his vocation in London in the "poofy" arts.

The swaggering aggression of The Sweeney's Jack Regan - the role that made him famous - was nothing like his real self. He is more like the introspective, opera-loving Morse.

Indeed, when I asked what makes him emotional, he identified classical music. "Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Sibelius ... the brilliance, the genius of it. Was it Lenin who said, 'Who could create such beauty whilst living in this vile hell?' Music does that for me, too."

He is reportedly paid $6.68 million a year by ITV. "If they think I am worth that to them, then great," he said. "I'm not embarrassed by the size of it, because I think I'm worth it, dare I say. I've been acting since 1960, so they're getting 40 years of experience, and they know I won't short-change them."

He is, right now, enjoying a gilded career, latterly with a gilded pay packet, and fighting cancer.

When they lost Morse, his fans grieved. And Morse's on-screen death affected Thaw, too. "Seeing yourself on a mortuary slab pulls you up," he said with unwitting prescience. "It reminds you of your own mortality."

- INDEPENDENT