Midsomer Murders star John Nettles has had a successful career in front of the cameras ever since bursting onto the scene in the 1980s. However, in stark comparison, his childhood was far from perfect…
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Born in Cornwall in 1943, the 78-year-old actor was adopted after his birth parents - an Irish nurse and an unidentified father - gave him up as an infant. While he was adopted by a carpenter named Eric Nettles and his wife Elsie, it seems that this wasn't the end of John's struggles which he says still "haunt" him to this day.
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Chatting to the Sunday Mirror back in 1999, the DCI Tom Barnaby actor revealed that he has a chronic fear of poverty inherited from his parents, which has had a devastating, life-long effect on him.
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"I'm frightened of money - scared that I might end up without the stuff like my parents," he admitted, adding that he believes it led them both to an early grave. While Eric died in 1970 at the age of 60, Elsie survived him by 15-odd years, passing away in the mid-eighties aged 64.
© Photo: ITVJohn began appearing in Midsomer Murders in 1999
"To have money like I have now is difficult to get used to because I knew great poverty as a child. My parents were poor and my father went bankrupt for some ridiculous sum like £600."
"It still pains me when I think about it, let alone talk about it - which is why I have never done so before now," he added.
© Photo: RexThe actor's childhood was far from perfect
While Eric owned a little business and his Elsie cleaned hotels and mended stockings to bring in much-needed cash during his youth, John said "it was never enough," and the family still struggled to keep the bailiffs from the door.
However, he said that he believes his parents also inherited a "nagging fear of poverty" long before their bankruptcy. "There was this incessant serious conversation about money or the lack of it," he explained. "My parents had been brought up in the shadow of the Great Depression. My mother's father had been out of work for 15 years.
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"All that's going to make you bitter and twisted, and so my parents inherited a lot of that, which merely added to their own financial worries. My dad became solitary and increasingly bitter. Being a proud man, he nursed an overwhelming sense of failure. He felt he'd failed not only himself but his family."
"Okay, I might have gone without, but I'm sure nobody noticed. Some of my friends might have had better blazers than me, but it didn't really matter, not to me. But it mattered to my father. He had such pride that he used to dress up in a tie and polished shoes just to go to the darts group."
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