'I still can't bear to hear his voice on TV': Ronnie Corbett's widow gives an impossibly moving first interview 14 months after the British comedy legend died of motor neurone disease

• e-mail

Amid the sunlit silence of her secluded Surrey home, Anne Corbett sits by the French windows gazing out at the banks of pink azaleas and blood-red rhododendrons in her garden.

Beyond them is the gate leading to the golf course where her adored husband, Ronnie, liked to stand, watching the world go by, and where he loved to play his favourite sport, and to take part in the charity tournaments he organised.

‘I think it was while I was sitting here in the days after Ron died that the full impact of the loss really hit me,’ she says. ‘Ron always loved the garden, and every spring we would sit here watching the flowers bloom. Suddenly, he wasn’t there to see them any more, and I was doing it alone and it was such an incredibly lonely feeling.’

Anne is speaking for the first time about her painful struggle to come to terms with the death of her husband 14 months ago from motor neurone disease, after more than 50 years together.

Inseparable: Anne and her adored husband Ronnie Corbett in 2010.  Looking back over more than 50 years together, Anne says: ‘We did love each other so very much'

With her soft, silver-blonde hair and remarkable eyes, she is a handsome woman who looks years younger than 84. Even in repose, she radiates the vitality and charisma that made her, as Anne Hart, one of the most glamorous and dynamic performers to appear on the West End stage.

It is, however, Ronnie’s life and career that pre-occupies her today.

‘People have no idea just how hard he worked to get where he did,’ Anne tells me. ‘He certainly wasn’t an overnight success. He had a very lovely, loving family. His dad was a McVitie’s baker in Edinburgh, and worked all through the night.

‘His mum was a real homemaker and cooked beautifully for them. Ron had a sister, Margaret, and a brother, Allan, both younger than him, and sadly they both died.

The couple with their daughters Emma (left) and Sophie in the early Seventies

‘Ron’s mum and dad made every penny count and went without things themselves to make sure that the children had a good start in life. They learned the piano and had elocution lessons and all sorts of things they could not really afford.

‘During National Service, Ron went into the RAF and was made an officer from an ordinary rank. They made him wear his full uniform all the time, because of his height — 5ft 1½in — they thought everyone would think he was a cadet otherwise.’

Ronnie Corbett’s early days in showbusiness were ones of struggle and hardship. He lived on digestive biscuits and milk and took jobs selling advertising space in a newspaper, hiring out tennis courts and working in bars.

‘The only job he ever gave up was washing up in a big restaurant,’ Anne says. ‘All the big platters they served meat on were on a shelf and it was too high. He would get hold of them and the greasy gravy went all over him, so he packed that in.’

When Ronnie and Anne first met, she was by far the more successful. At 22, she’d appeared with Tommy Trinder in Sunday Night At The London Palladium, and at 26 was the leading lady in the Crazy Gang’s last two London hits, Clown Jewels and Young In Heart.

She went on to appear in West End cabaret clubs with Danny La Rue, including Winston’s, which is where she encountered and worked alongside the young comedian Ronnie Corbett. ‘When we first met, I think Ronnie thought I was a bit of a hard case,’ she laughs.

‘But Ron was not only highly intelligent but also extremely perceptive. He soon realised that my brashness was just a facade to protect myself, and that I also suffered terribly from stage fright and was often throwing up before I went on.’

In 1957, Anne had married John Padley, a singer in a group called The Four Jones Boys. The marriage was a failure.

‘The truth is that Ron was so charming, so beautifully dressed and so funny that I never even thought about his height,' said Anne (pictured with Ronnie in the Sixties)

‘John was a nice guy and he was never unkind to me,’ she says. ‘He was just never there. He would come back from touring, I would iron his shirts and he would leave again. In the end, he moved out of my house and we separated.’

Corbett, meanwhile, was ‘totally bowled over by her’, once saying ‘I had never felt an intense heart-stopping attraction like this ever before and I knew this was the real thing’.

But he remained a ‘cautious suitor’, worried that his height might put off this statuesque beauty who stood 5ft 8in tall.

‘People keep going on about this,’ Anne says. ‘The truth is that Ron was so charming, so beautifully dressed and so funny that I never even thought about his height.’

Six years elapsed before Ronnie plucked up the courage to ask her out for a drink at the Buckstone Club, next door to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. There the courtship blossomed.

It was there too, on a never to be forgotten day in 1963, that Ronnie first met a portly actor named Ronnie Barker. He worked with him on The Frost Report, the BBC satire show hosted by David Frost, before going on to make TV history in The Two Ronnies. It brought them audiences of 17 million, considerable wealth and, ultimately, global fame.

‘Ron owed a tremendous amount to David Frost,’ says Anne. ‘David believed in Ron’s talent from the very start, and it was on The Frost Report that Ron made the vital breakthrough.’

Divorced finally from John Padley, and having won the approval of Anne’s father, Marvin Hart, a former light heavyweight boxer, she and Ronnie were married at Brixton Register Office on May 11, 1966.

Their life together began with a tragedy. Their first child, Andrew, was born with his heart on the wrong side of his body, and with several holes in it. He lived only six weeks following surgery.

‘We were both heartbroken,’ Anne tells me. ‘I will never forget that when we went in to look at Andrew afterwards, they said: “We’ve dressed him for you.” And they’d put this little pair of bootees on him.’

Andrew’s death was followed by the birth of their daughters, Emma and Sophie, one year apart, in 1967 and 1968, and Anne’s own glittering career was halted by her desire to become a wife, mother and homemaker, while enjoying the fruits of Ronnie’s success.

‘We travelled all over the world and Ron always did it in style, like everything he did. First-class flights, first-class hotels, best restaurants, best food. We stayed at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice and La Mamounia in Marrakech.

When Ronnie and Anne first met, she was by far the more successful. At 22, she’d appeared with Tommy Trinder in Sunday Night At The London Palladium, and at 26 was the leading lady in the Crazy Gang’s last two London hits, Clown Jewels and Young In Heart

‘We always had wonderful cars. The last car Ron had was a really beautiful Jaguar, and the day when he became too ill to drive it any more was one of the saddest I can remember,’ she says.

‘The only thing I fought him tooth and nail about was the purchase of our house on the edge of famous Muirfield Golf Course.

‘That night, I kept him awake, saying: “I don’t want a great big house in Scotland, Ron.” And he said: “Anne, I’m playing with Lee Trevino in the morning and I want to go to sleep.”

‘So we bought it in the end and thank God we did. We’ve had it for 40 years now and Emma and Sophie are desperate to keep it. To them it means Scotland, and Scotland means Ron.’

Looking back over more than 50 years together, Anne says: ‘We did love each other so very much, and I shall never regret my decision to give up my career. It was worth it for the sheer fun, joy and happiness of sharing my life with Ron.’

Of course, they experienced ups and downs and the loss of Ronnie Barker, aged 76, in 2005 was a source of profound grief to both of them.

‘We wanted to visit him in the hospice, but Ronnie B would not see anyone because he had lost so much weight,’ Anne reveals.

The following summer, Barker’s widow, Joy, gave a party which the Corbetts attended, but when Ronnie stood up to propose the toast to his friend and partner, his voice ‘fell away in swallowed tears’.

Ronnie Corbett’s own last illness started around Christmas 2014 when he began finding it hard to breathe and to lie down.

The loss of Ronnie Barker, aged 76, in 2005 was a source of profound grief to both of them

‘We couldn’t make out what it was. The problem was mainly his sleeping,’ Anne explains.

‘He did take a lot of sleeping tablets because he had such an active brain and found it very difficult to sleep, but they weren’t having any effect any more and we thought this is not right, so we saw six or seven of the best London specialists to try to find out what it was.

‘Ron was still appearing in ITV commercials, so his health was kept secret, known only to his family and close friends. In January 2015, we went to see Professor Michael Polkey at the Royal Brompton Hospital. He suggested Ron used a small ventilator which would aid his breathing.

‘At first, Ron said he would never be comfortable with it on, but it turned out to be the best thing. It was only oxygen, but it transformed things so Ron was able to lie down and sleep.’

Following some more tests, the Corbetts returned to see Professor Polkey in March 2015. His diagnosis came as a shock.

‘He told us it was most likely to be motor neurone disease,’ says Anne. MND affects the nervous system, causing breathing and other muscle- dependent activities to become increasingly difficult.

‘As you can imagine, it just knocked us both back. We had not really heard of it.

‘If it hadn’t been for Stephen Hawking, who suffers from the disease, and the Eddie Redmayne film about him, The Theory Of Everything, we would not have heard of it at all. We were never told how long Ron had [to live], because everybody who has this terrible disease is different.’

The average survival of someone diagnosed with MND is between three to five years, but Ronnie Corbett, then 85, had just a year left to live.

‘Ron went downhill quite fast in the last five months. He could hardly walk. It was heartbreaking and tragic. I can’t believe it even now. But Emma and Sophie were wonderful, and so were the NHS girls who came in.

‘They saw who it was and said: “Oh, it’s our Ron”, and they helped at night, which was a Godsend as it meant I could manage to get some sleep.

‘Emma, Sophie and I took it in turns to nurse him. It became a 24-hour job, with Ron getting gradually weaker.

‘It became harder to get him to eat anything. Some days, all he managed was a few pieces of melon, a glass of champagne and a Liquorice Allsort. His weight dropped drastically and he simply began to fade away.

‘Then he started to fall out of bed a lot. He had this bell to ring because he was in the room right next to me, but I didn’t always hear him. But Bazil, our rescue dog, used to make this howling noise, and it was he who heard Ron every time. I’d go in and he’d be on the floor again.

‘Emma and Sophie were with me as much as they could, and so were my older grandchildren, Tom mainly [Emma’s playwright son], because Dylan [Sophie’s actor son] was still at school.

‘Sophie used to stand in the shower with Ron, so he could have a shower.

‘The thing is he was such a proud man. He didn’t want to be seen in the shower by these kind ladies who came in to help, but he would stand in the shower with Sophie and he’d have his pants on and she’d have her clothes on and he could stand under the warm water.’

Anne pauses constantly during this part of the conversation, admitting that it is ‘so very hard to talk about, because it all comes flooding back’.

Yet, through all that terrible time, Ronnie never once grumbled or complained, she says proudly.

‘And he was so charming to all the girls that came in to help, and he would always thank them. But because of his pride, he didn’t want strangers to help him, although they were just so good, all of them.

‘We used to have to give him a hand to sit up. Tom would be one side, or Sophie, and we would slowly get him sitting up and Ron would say: “You’re pushing me.” And I would say: “Darling, I’m not pushing you. I’m trying to help you sit up.”

‘“No you’re not,” he would insist. “You’re pushing me.” ’

While Ronnie was slowly slipping away from her, Anne found in a drawer an envelope containing the love letters he had written to her in New Zealand in 1962, when she was on tour with Annie Get Your Gun (an unknown 18-year-old was in the chorus line — later the acclaimed opera singer, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa).

‘I got one of Ron’s letters out and started to read it, but I had to stop, as I began to weep. They are lovely, lovely letters, but I just couldn’t read them and I still can’t. Perhaps one day I shall.’

In spite of Ronnie’s increasing frailty, he was not in pain, and up to the last 48 hours, he was conscious and aware of everything.

Then, on Tuesday, March 29, 2016, with his oxygen levels at a dangerous low, Ronnie fell into a coma and was taken from their home in Addington to a private room in Shirley Oaks Hospital in Croydon, Surrey.

There, two days later, at 8.50am, with Anne, Emma and Sophie at his bedside, the great and much-loved Ronnie Corbett, a true gentleman of his profession, and a diminutive giant of comedy, slipped away peacefully.

The funeral was to tax Anne’s emotions to the utmost. She elected not to wear mourning, appearing instead in flowing floral chiffon.

‘As we drove from the house to the church, all the policemen along the route saluted him,’ she recalls.

Outside the church, a vast throng of people had assembled, along with hundreds of Press and television cameras. As she emerged from her car, Anne reverted to being the star she was, going to the edge of the pavement, raising her arm aloft and waving and blowing kisses to Ronnie’s fans.

‘The girls, the grandchildren and I went ahead into the church, and as they carried Ron from the car, we heard, from inside the church, this great wave of applause outside. His fans were saying thank you to him for all the laughter and the memories.

‘After the funeral, I slipped into the sort of wilderness that I suppose everyone experiences after losing the person they love.’

For a time, Ronnie’s face and work were hardly ever off the TV, but Anne could not watch any of it. ‘I still can’t listen to his voice on the television, or anywhere else. If it comes on for any reason, I just cannot listen to it. The feeling is still too raw.

‘Many kind friends rallied and invited me out, to parties and to the theatre. But I just felt I couldn’t face the world.

‘I can’t believe it’s almost 15 months since he’s been gone. I’ve been lost.

‘People, hoping to encourage me, keep saying how “wonderfully” I am doing, but I know only too well I’m not. It’s the actress in me giving a performance of doing wonderfully. At times it’s seemed almost too much to bear, but you have no choice, do you? Life must go on.’

Anne has had serious health problems of her own over the years and used to ‘dread’ what Ron would do if she went before him even though ‘he was a very able man. He could cook. He could iron! Turnbull and Asser, where he always bought his shirts, taught him how to iron them!

‘Thank God I’ve got the girls and grandchildren,’ she says. ‘They ring me a lot and come to spend time with me. Emma does wonderful work helping children with special difficulties. Sophie is still a successful actress, doing voiceovers for TV commercials.

‘My eldest grandson, Tom, has written two novels and several plays. His sister, Tilly, is at university on a film course, working on a television documentary.

‘Sophie’s son, Dylan, is the actor in the family. He won a place at the National Youth Theatre. And my youngest grandson, Billy, who is 11, has one of the leading roles in a school production of The Addams Family musical. So the family tradition lives on.

‘It’s with their help that I am surviving, but I am just surviving. I don’t enjoy much any more.’

She pauses before continuing.

‘There has been an empty feeling since Ron has gone . . . An emptiness, yes, that’s what it is. But I think and hope that I am slowly emerging from the mist.’

Will Ronnie’s Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey next month be an ordeal for her? She ponders this.

‘I’m proud for Ron, of course, that it’s at Westminster Abbey, with all those famous people there to honour him,’ she said. ‘But I can’t pretend that it won’t be an ordeal in some ways.’

There can be no doubt of the pain Anne Corbett has endured in losing one of the most beloved of Britain’s national treasures.

But when this brave-hearted survivor of one of showbusiness’s great love stories enters the Abbey, and the celebrity-packed congregation rises to receive her, Anne will surely hear Ronnie Corbett’s own unforgettable tribute to her ringing in her ears.

‘What luck,’ he once said, ‘to have won the love of such a wonderful wife as Anne.’

The Service of Thanksgiving for the Life and Work of Ronnie Corbett CBE will take place at Westminster Abbey at noon on Wednesday, June 7. For tickets, visit the eventbrite.co.uk website and search for ‘Ronnie Corbett CBE’.

At the request of Mrs Corbett, the Daily Mail has made a donation to the Motor Neurone Disease Association (01604 611860; fundraising@mndassociation.org).