'After six weeks of marriage I realised my life was awful and I'd made a mistake,' confesses Sally. 'They told me I looked like their little sister.'Īged 21, she'd been in a tempestuous relationship with Nigel Newman, son of a wealthy shipping magnate, for five years when, during one of their many splits, she gave him an ultimatum - marry her or she'd never see him again.
'When I was a teenager I didn't date many men because I looked too young,' she says. Sally shot to fame in 1970 playing eight-year-old Phyllis in The Railway Children - even though she was 20.Īlthough looking young may have been good for her acting career, it wasn't great for her love life. Still a beauty: Sally Thomsett as she is now It can't have escaped O'Sullivan's notice that while his own film star good looks have faded rapidly, Sally's girl-next-door sexiness is still very much in evidence. 'The next time I saw him, nine or ten years ago, when we were unveiling a plaque to the Man About The House film at Elstree Studios, he was fine, back to his fun self.' It was a shame, but I knew he'd be all right. It's difficult in this profession, you are never in the same place at the same time. But it wasn't any of my business and I knew I wasn't going to be there to pick up the pieces.
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'We did a Christmas TV show together and I knew something was wrong with him - he wasn't his usual self. I don't know all the details but he's so easygoing, he doesn't like confrontation and he was obviously going through a lot of it. 'I saw him when his marriage was breaking up and he was in a bad state,' she says.
Sally Thomsett, who now lives in Marylebone, central London, with her partner of 15 years Paul Agnew, a landscape gardener, and their 12-year-old daughter Charlotte, remembers how tough it got for him. 'I've had a really hard time,' he admitted in 1994. He went on to wed Christine Smart, but later revealed their divorce in the early 1990s was so distressing that he had to book into a clinic to recover. His relationship with Tessa Wyatt, with whom he'd starred in Robin's Nest, broke up, allegedly because he wouldn't marry her. It was after that that things started to go wrong for TV's golden boy. When that ended, he went on to star as the eponymous hero in Dick Turpin, which became a Saturday family favourite, then in the sitcom Me And My Girl. It's a long time since his heyday in the Seventies and early Eighties when everything O'Sullivan touched turned to gold.Īfter Man About The House finished in 1976, a new sitcom - Robin's Nest - was created for him. He took us for lunch and we had a good laugh reliving old memories and taking photos. I was preparing myself for what could be a bit of a shock, but he seemed well and looked fine to me. I knew Richard had had a stroke and I expected to see someone who was very ill. 'I'd gone down to Brinsworth House with Paula and Brian Murphy, who played our landlord in Man About The House. When I last saw him, two years ago, he still had his cheeky smile and that twinkle in his eye. Of course, he's not going to look like he did in 1972. 'He didn't look like that then,' she says. O'Sullivan with his Man About The House co-stars Sally Thomsett (left) and Paula Wilcoxįrom the photographs taken this week, O'Sullivan must be barely recognisable to Sally. Two years earlier, he broke his leg in an accident, the legacy of which is the walking stick he still has to use today.īefore the stroke, O'Sullivan had lived almost as a recluse in a two-bedroom flat in west London with his only child, Jamie, from his later relationship with actress Tessa Wyatt. O'Sullivan chose to go into the Brinsworth House for retired entertainment actors in Twickenham, south-west London, after suffering a severe stroke in 2003, from which he never fully recovered. Having been involved with him at the peak of his looks, charisma and fame must make his decline all the more shocking for Sally, 58.Įarlier this week, the Mail published a startling photograph of the now 64-year-old actor looking frail and older than his years as he hobbled along the streets near the residential home where he now lives. Sally, meanwhile, played Jo, practically introducing the idea of the dumb blonde into British consciousness.Īnd off-screen, it was her, not Paula, the dashing Richard fell for.
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