Stuart Mungall sat in the almost empty auditorium of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh and waited for the play to begin. It was late 1967, he had just joined a small theatre company in Scotland and had been asked if he’d like to watch rehearsals for A Christmas Carol.
‘A young woman came on stage,’ he recalls. ‘From the first second, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had such a magic quality and aura.
I was totally hooked. It was love at first sight.’
The young woman was Joan Morrow, then 27. And to 28-year-old Stuart’s delight, she was cast alongside him in the company’s next production, Toad Of Toad Hall. ‘I was Weasel and she played Lucy Rabbit,’ he recalls with a laugh.
Just before their marriage, Stuart told her his secret.
‘Before I met her I had had a relationship with another actress who had become pregnant. Our relationship didn’t work out and the baby girl had been adopted. Joan took it very well.’
After a whirlwind courtship, the couple were married on May 11, 1968, with Joan’s close friend and successful young actress Jane Asher, then also famous as Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, as bridesmaid.
After their quiet marriage at a register office, they lived for a year in Asher’s family home in Central London. ‘We paid only ten shillings a week rent,’ Stuart says. ‘We then rented a one-bedroom flat in Tooting where we stayed throughout our married life. It never became too small as we didn’t have children. They just didn’t happen.
‘We never had much money, but after my fee for being in the Yorkie Bar advert, we managed to buy a tiny stone cottage in the Midi district of France and went there whenever we could. We weren’t bothered about the precariousness of the acting world. If we needed money, we’d get a different type of job. At one time, Joan sold cigarettes in Woolworths and I was a lorry driver. We used to work all round the country. We performed together in Lock Up Your Daughters in Newcastle, for example, and I directed a play in Cheltenham and later did some TV including The Bill and Dr Finlay’s Casebook.’
Then, 25 years ago and completely out of the blue, Stuart was contacted by the mother of his child to say his daughter had traced her and wanted to meet her father. ‘We met for a drink. She was 19. We got on really well and over time got to really love each other. She is now married with two children. Luckily Joan and my daughter clicked too.’
Joan had by then decided she was fed up with acting and wanted to do something with plants and gardens, so they sold their house in France and used the money to buy a garden centre in South London. ‘She loved it but it was very hard work so I joined her as a partner and we worked together. We called it The Independent Republic of Patio. People used to come in and sit and feel at peace. It was heaven for us.’
The first sign that Joan was not well came six years ago when she kept losing her balance. Stuart says: ‘A few months later she suddenly screamed for me. I rushed into the hall and found her about to keel over. Luckily I caught her. ’
She was taken to St George’s Hospital in Tooting and was originally diagnosed with a heart attack, then a stroke. ‘Eventually a French doctor said she thought it was corticobasal degeneration – a degeneration of the middle part of the brain. Joan was also displaying some symptoms of Parkinson’s.
‘Her old friend Jane, who is president of Parkinson’s UK, recommended a professor at The National Hospital for Neurology in London. Joan went in a week at a time for tests and was eventually diagnosed with Pick’s disease, which, as the French doctor predicted, would only be confirmed after she died.
‘I then became her full-time carer. I did all the cooking, washed her and did her hair and all the intimate things, which was OK for me but undignified for her. Social services used to come round but we both hated it, especially when some of them patronisingly called her ‘‘sweet pea’’. We were a very independent couple.’
Stuart rarely left her side. ‘I only went out to rush to Waitrose, or occasionally for an hour or so to do some watercolour painting in my shed in the garden. I rigged up a bell so she could ring if she needed me.
‘Physically she was so stiff and in such pain in the end that she could move only one hand slightly. Even holding a fork became impossible and she often couldn’t get to the commode in time. She deteriorated mentally too.
‘Then, last autumn, the doctor told me she had three months at best to live. Part of me knew she would eventually have to go into a hospice and be fed by tube, but neither of us wanted that. I knew they would look after her but they wouldn’t love her like I did and I didn’t want anyone else to care for her. ’
Joan, who was 69 when she died, had Pick’s disease – a rare form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s – and polymyalgia rheumatica, a debilitating condition that causes pain, stiffness and tenderness in the muscles supporting the neck, shoulders, hips and thighs.
He confessed to mercy-killing his terminally ill, wheelchair-bound wife Joan in December 2010.
He organised Joan’s humanist funeral on February 18 this year from prison but was refused permission to go. Jane Asher spoke at the funeral. She said: ‘I have never seen two people more entirely and devotedly in love... anyone could see they were a couple who would be together as long as fate would allow. ’
Joan’s ashes are now in a terracotta urn in Stuart’s living room.