့MYANMAR LOVE STORY TV
You might be just sitting watching TV but you are still sharing this lovely communal energy, and at a stroke that goes and that is very tough. I think some of that is to do with the fact that if you have been in a very close, loving relationship you don’t realise how much you give each other. We are sitting in the members’ room of High Road House in Chiswick, a short walk from the home she has lived in for more than 30 years, and despite her bright eyes and warm smile, the conversation is sombre.īecause the subject we are discussing today is the loss of her adored second husband, John Leach – father of her two younger children, Jack, 34, and Martha, 30 – in July last year, four years after his initial cancer diagnosis. Having lost both her mother and her best friend Caron Keating to the disease, she became an active fundraiser and honorary patron, unaware of just how important the charity would become in her own family’s story a few years later.
Janet was initially drawn to Maggie’s – with its welcoming drop-in centres offering emotional and practical help to anyone affected by a cancer diagnosis – in 2008, when its west London centre opened. She is also a passionate supporter of Maggie’s, one of the charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas appeal (in 2016 she was awarded an MBE for services to theatre and charity). The boys, aged between two and 17, are the children of Janet’s daughter Sophie Ellis-Bextor and her musician husband Richard Jones, and their day-to-day lives are inwtertwined with Janet’s (Sophie, 42, lives round the corner and says her mother is ‘my go-to for everything’).īest known for her four years on Blue Peter in the mid-1980s, Janet remains, at 66, a busy woman very much involved with her local theatre ( the Lyric in Hammersmith).
Janet Ellis meets me in the hour’s break between her morning writing session – she is halfway through her third novel – and picking up two of her five grandsons from school. The presenter and actress talks about dealing with loss, and why she’s supporting one of the Telegraph’s Christmas charities Janet Ellis: 'My husband's cancer wasn't curable – we knew we wouldn't be silver-haired together'