Saturday 25 June 2022 12:42 AM Dennis Waterman's daughter reveals tumult and reconciliation before the star's ... trends now

Dennis Waterman’s daughter, Julia, keeps slipping into the present tense when speaking about her very famous father. He died from lung cancer six weeks ago, and his body has since been cremated, but as she says: ‘There’s this incredible sort of disbelief. I still think he’s not gone. I don’t know when that’s going to change. It’s funny when your dad’s on TV because he’s kind of always there.’

The legendary actor has always been ‘there’ since the 1970s when he starred as The Sweeney’s tough-guy copper DS George Carter. He then cemented his reputation as the nation’s favourite womanising hardman, playing reformed jailbird Terry McCann in the TV classic Minder. So much so, that Dennis never dared take his daughters, Julia, now 43, and her sister, former EastEnders actress Hannah, 46, to the sort of places dads normally do, like funfairs, for fear of being mobbed.

When he died aged 74 in May, Julia’s phone ‘practically blew up with so many people messaging me: “Your Dad was a legend”; “He was a hero, an icon.” That’s a word I hear a lot.’

She removes her glasses to wipe away the tears that threaten.

‘It was so quick. He played golf on Christmas Day and he said he was fine. He just complained of a pain in his leg.’

Dennis was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer less than three months before his death, after a tumour was discovered in a bone in his leg following that festive round of golf.

Julia’s stepmother, Pam — Dennis’s fourth wife — rang from their home in Spain to break the terrible news.

‘She said: “Jules, it’s not good.” I had a bad feeling about it,’ says Julia, in this, the only interview with a member of Dennis’s close family since his death.

‘There had been quite a few weeks of tests and scans after they found the tumour in his leg. When people start to find tumours you turn to Dr Google, don’t you? I read that bone cancer tends to be secondary. You think, “Oh s***, there’s a primary somewhere.”

‘Something told me this wasn’t going to go well. The drinking, the smoking and just the hard living — he hadn’t really followed doctors’ orders, had he?’

Indeed, her father lived his life as hard and fast off-screen as the characters he played — think Terry McCann ‘on steroids’ (Julia’s words) — until he finally found contentment with Pam, his much-loved wife of 11 years.

Dennis was, as Julia says, ‘a bloke’s bloke’ with an extraordinarily turbulent love life, that included a frighteningly volatile relationship with his third wife, the actress Rula Lenska.

Their explosive love affair, which ended his marriage to Julia and Hannah’s mother, Patricia Maynard, in 1981, provoked endless headlines about violent break-ups and slanging matches, until Rula finally left in 1997 amid accusations of domestic abuse.

Dennis later admitted he had sometimes hit Rula in a defiant TV interview with Piers Morgan that prompted widespread outrage as he insisted she ‘wasn’t a beaten wife’ but a ‘strong, intelligent’ woman who could argue and that, frustrated, he’d resorted to ‘lashing out’ to stop her.

For Julia — caught up in this ‘craziness’ with her sister, Hannah, and Rula’s daughter Lara, now 42 — those years were traumatic.

For most of her teenage years, she says, she ‘shut Dad out’, preferring a calm life with her mother and stepfather, Jeremy, now a retired judge, in Norfolk.

‘As a child, I had this dream that this fairy-tale dad would be revealed who would choose us instead of this craziness, and we’d all live happily ever after. But life wasn’t like that,’ says Julia.

‘Being at Dad and Rula’s was this Technicolor whirlwind of an experience with mad screaming fights. If you’re a kid, they’re amazingly unsettling.

‘I’d hear Dad and Rula shouting at each other. Rula would be going on a lot and he’d be saying: “Just stop it. Shut up. I don’t want to hear this.” Then he’d leave the house.

‘He’d probably go to the golf course or wherever. She hated that. Then there’d be slammed doors in the early hours and music would play very loudly.’

Today, Julia is a larger-than-life woman with a rich laugh and warm heart. She lives in a pretty, painted clapboard house in a small Hampshire village with her lovely six-year-old daughter, Coco, and partner of two years, Simon.

Upstairs is the gold disc her father received for singing the soundtrack to Minder, I Could Be So Good For You. Co-written by her mother, it reached No 3 in the charts in 1980 before their marriage was shattered by Waterman’s turbulent affair with Rula.

Julia was three when Dennis left.

‘I just remember he wasn’t there any more,’ she says. ‘It was in the news. It was the first time I’d realised there was something different about my family.’

Hers was a childhood of first-class flights, premieres, and parties peopled with her father’s ‘tribe of colourful and lively actors’, such as George Cole, famous as TV’s Arthur Daley, and Dalziel And Pascoe’s Warren Clarke.

‘At Dad’s, there were always tons of people in the house, with barbecues and parties,’ she says. ‘I remember vodka, lots of vodka, and the clink of ice cubes. I’d feel as if Rula became more and more vivacious — you know, bigger — and Dad would get smaller.

‘They’d either be all over each other — it was obviously a very powerful sexual relationship, but you don’t understand that as a child — or rowing.

‘When Dad was happy he’d get out his guitar and I’d burst into song. I’d be this tiny little thing belting out some sort of number.But those moments didn’t happen often. The more unhappy he was, the more he withdrew [from the house] and the more alone I was with Rula.’

She never much liked her stepmother. An intelligent, articulate woman who is now something of a high-flier in financial services, Julia knows jolly well few children take kindly to the person who has destroyed their parents’ marriage, but, in this instance, her animosity is visceral.

Her first memory of the flame-haired actress is of her ‘click-clacking around calling me “darling”.

‘I found her quite scary. She was massive and had this crazy hair and really deep voice. There was never a part of me that thought “Oh she’s nice” and wanted to sit on her knee.

‘There were only six months between [Rula’s daughter] Lara and me. We were always being told we were like sisters and had to share a room. Rula wanted me to call her Mamma. I told my mum about it and said I didn’t want to. And I never did.

‘I remember once — I must have been pretty young — she was reading a book to Lara and me. We were lying on the bed on each side of her and I had my head there.’ Julia gestures to her right breast. ‘Nothing specific happened, but I just felt really angry and bit her.

‘It caused an absolute s*** show, as you

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