'I probably regret my whole life’

Press, 7 May 1987, Page 15

'I probably regret my whole life’

Patrick MacNee, still best remembered as super-slick Steed in "The Avengers,” is now a pensioner — and saddled with sorrow, reports DUO writer Sue Maloney.

As dapper, debonair John Steed in the hit television series, “The Avengers,” he had only to click his fingers and women swooned at his feet. In his Saville Row suit, his bowler hat cheekily tilted, and with his rolled umbrella, he was every woman’s idea of the gallant hero. Now Patrick MacNee has officially become a pensioner. At 65, he’s still devilishly handsome. But ask him if he has any regrets and his answer is chillingly sad. "I probably regret my whole life,” he says. “I’ve mucked it up from start to finish.

“And, as for women, I’d rather curl up with a good

book these days than romp around the bedroom. I don’t think I’m much use to women any more.”

Apart from a few extra Inches around the girth, he has hardly changed. The famous eyelids are still at half mast when he speaks, but he admits he now hardly ever looks in the mirror. Nor does he watch “The Avengers” when the series is repeated on TV. “It’s very painful seeing yourself 30 years young — you start to get maudlin and wonder where the years went,” he says. "I’m not frightened of old age. I’m not even frightened of

dying. In fact, I really couldn’t care less if I went tomorrow."

He says that most mornings he is mildly amused that he is still alive. Most of his close friends died during World War II and, even now, he says his contemporaries back home in Palm Springs, California, are “dropping like flies.” “During the war I was in the Royal Navy — on torpedo boats in the North Sea,” he recalls. “I went in at 19 and left when I was 25. In that time, all my friends, and most of the men who had Joined up with me, had been wiped out. “I don’t know why I survived. It’s sheer luck. Since then I’ve regarded every year as a bonus.” His biggest regret was walking out on his wife, Barbara, and their two children, Jenny and Rupert, when they were only toddlers. Today, he is rid-

den with guilt over his daughter, a chronic asthmatic. She also has a steel plate In her head following an operation for a brain tumour, and has had four cardiac arrests over the past few years. “They say asthma can be psychosomatic,” says MacNee. “I can’t help believing that I caused that when I left her.”

He also regrets his divorce from Barbara, with whom he is still good friends. She now lives in California, running a successful glass business. “She has never forgiven me, and I don’t blame her. I’ve never forgiven myself, either," he says. “In many ways I wish I was still married to her, but, unfortunately, I can't put the clock back.” Over the years, however, MacNee has tried to make up for what he did to Jenny, now 37, and Rupert, 40. "When I left them be-

hind in Britain to try my luck as an actor in Canada, we’d been living in extreme poverty and I could no longer cope with the responsibilities,” he says. “But I was young then. By the time I'd realisedthe harm I’d done, it was too late. It’s always too late If you hurt your children. We get on tremendously well now, but I know, deep down, that I’ll never be able to undo the harm I’ve done.”

His second marriage, to actress Catherine Woodville, failed after only a year, when she left him for another man. Catherine was 16 years his junior and Patrick blames the age difference for the split. But he admits: "I’ve always been attracted to the wrong women — the type who end up walking all over me. There’s a lot of pain inside me these days.”

He sits in his London hotel suite at the Savoy (he has been starring in "Killing Jessica” at the Savoy Theatre) elegantly turned out in a silk cravat and cashmere sweater. He returns to Britain once a year to do a play or to make a film. And, though his home is now in America, he says he practically Ilves out of a suitcase, travelling where he is offered work.

MacNee says: "It’s better to keep busy. It’s not flood to have too much ime to think.”

He has had* psychological counselling to try to get over his guilt feelings about his daughter and for the pain of being rejected by his second wife. But falling in love or marrying again is not something he Is willing to consider.

MacNee, a cousin of the late David Niven, has a Hungarian woman friend, with whom he says he has a very “dear” relationship, but he adds: “As for being in love, well, that only happens when you’re young. Sex is a terrible effort and slightly undignified at my age.” He laughs when asked If he Is happy. “I don’t believe in happiness,” he says. "To admit to being happy is Just a self-satis-fied illusion.”

He looks after himself physically. He walks miles, plays tennis, rides horses and jogs. He doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol these days, either, but puts his good health down to fortune, rather than good management. “People are meant to dle at 50,” he says. “Any day past that is down to luck. I’ll just keep going until I drop. When I fall down, I guess I’ll know Umdead. 0