Sheila Hancock is dancing around her dressing room, counting out loud as she tries to remember the dance steps she had learnt earlier in the day.
“I'm too old for all of this,'' she laughs, pointing her toes and unleashing an elegant high kick. “I'm not sure about all these new steps and routines. I don't know if I can still totter about on stage.'' At 76, Hancock still looks svelte and sprightly with her neat white bob, black jeans and tan leather jacket, but tottering about on stage is always a bit harder in a habit. In her latest role, she plays Mother Superior in the stage adaptation of Sister Act, the 1992 film starring Whoopi Goldberg in which Deloris, a murder witness, is sent by the police to a convent for protection, where she transforms the choir, much to the dismay of Mother Superior.
One might forgive Hancock for putting her feet up with a cup of cocoa instead of performing eight punishing all-singing-and-dancing shows a week but she couldn't resist taking on the role of the icy nun who slowly melts. “There's a huge warmth to it and it's about sisterhood, which appeals to me. And the idea of a group of people facing adversity and triumphing is particularly timely.''
Hancock admits that despite a constant battle with stage fright, for which she sees a hypnotist, she is addicted to work, including writing — she has published three bestselling memoirs and is working on a novel.
“It's an illness. I have been really scared when rehearsing and thought to myself, why do I torture myself like this?
"But it is about proving that I still can do it. And the fear makes me do it. I will not be defeated.''
Breaking glass ceilings
That determination has seen Hancock bulldoze through a few glass ceilings.
Rather than take a back-seat role to her two husbands, Alec Ross and John Thaw — both actors — for much of her career she was the more successful half of the partnerships, as film and TV work and West End roles kept coming her way.
Born on the Isle of Wight, Hancock was introduced to the world of performing through the weekly piano singalongs her parents hosted.
“There were not many options for girls in those days,'' she recalls. “I was bright at school but didn't know what university was — nobody did.
"So the options were being a nurse, a teacher or an old maverick who went on to the stage. I did a school play and the head boy asked me out to a dance and I thought, ‘This is good, I'll do this.'''
Her training at Rada was less to her taste. “I hated every minute.
"It was like a finishing school. I was a scholarship girl, I had an estuary accent and everyone else was like Lord this, or the Hon that. They were all posh. I was also tall, so I got cast as a man a lot — I made a pretty good Petrucchio.''
Hancock has rarely been out of work since but admits that motherhood was the one role she never perfected, with success often coming at the cost of her children, who she “neglected terribly''.
She has three daughters — Melanie, from her marriage to Ross, Abigail, her daughter with Thaw, and Joanna, Thaw's daughter from his first marriage, who she considers “very much part of the family''.
Hancock admits her turbulent relationship with Thaw, to whom she was married for 29 years, distracted her from family life.
Thaw was an alcoholic for all but the last six years of their marriage, which at best was “volatile'' and at worst unbearable, prompting them to separate more times than she can remember.
What kept bringing them back together?
“It was an obsession. We did love one another. We could not be apart, we kept leaving one another but it did not work.''
Love's subject lost
In 2002, Thaw lost his battle with cancer and Hancock lost the love of her life. She sank into a deep depression, which at times “nearly took over''.
“I only emerged gradually,'' she says.
“I do suffer from depression, and realised, about two years on, that I was sinking badly, so I yanked myself out and went travelling to Budapest and southern Italy. Both trips were very scary without John but I was accepting the fact that my old life was over and I had to rebuild my new one. You have two choices: You can live with your memories or start again.''
Hancock lost her mother and both husbands to cancer and is herself a breast cancer survivor.
But she is definitely not, she insists, “some kind of tragic widow''.
“I've had a normal life. Everyone gets ill, everyone loses people. I have never thought to say, why me? That's the nature of life.''
In her rare time off, her passions are spoiling her seven grandchildren, who are regular visitors to her homes in London and the south of France and “sitting in cafés and watching the world go by — it is the best thing in the world''.
When in need of a good giggle, she listens to recordings of Radio 4's Just a Minute, on which she has long been a regular guest and on which she frequently appeared with the late Clement Freud.
Hancock was to present the first episode of BBC Two's My Life in Verse, in which she explores how poetry helped her deal with her grief after Thaw's death.
“I am hoping to do more of those kind of programmes. We should have some more older women in television.
"But we get rid of them when they are older. We are generally bad with old folk.''
In the meantime, despite the dance routines and the aching muscles that follow, she is relishing putting the finishing touches to Mother Superior.
“The best thing is watching her slowly open herself up to new things, which she learns from, as I have.
Rigidity and protecting yourself is not a way to live. You have got to open yourself up to harm and hurt and challenges, otherwise you are only half living.''
