Charlie Lawson, best known as Coronation Street‘s Jim McDonald, has opened up about scattering his late wife’s ashes after holding on to them for eight years.
The Northern Irish actor, 59, said his partner Debbie Stanley encouraged him to scatter Lesley Bond’s ashes last year, following her tragic death in 2010.
Speaking to the Mirror, Charlie explained that despite splitting with Lesley before her death, the make-up designer still has a “special part” in his heart.
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He told the paper that Lesley had suffered from “chronic depression” and battled an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs before her death.
She eventually died from a fall and hypothermia, with Charlie calling it a “horrible end”.
He said: “She’d become a raging alcoholic. There was no one else involved, and we still loved each other very much, but it was becoming dangerous to be with her.
“She was living in Oxford and had a fall. Police were called a couple of days later as she’d been reported missing.”
Speaking further, Charlie recalled the “absolutely terrible” moment had to identify the body of his second wife and said coppers thought she had been murdered.
He continued: “They said I had to identify her. They initially thought she had been murdered, but she had died of hypothermia. It was awful, absolutely terrible to go and identify her because I loved her.”
After she was cremated, Charlie held on to her ashes for years. And it was only when his current partner Debbie brought it up that he decided to act.
He said Debbie “instigated it” and told him he needed to do it.
Charlie went up to Scotland with Lesley’s sister and her husband to scatter the ashes.
Now, he’s “proud” of his new wife for initiating the conversation and admitted he’ll “never forget it”.
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Charlie suffered a mini-stroke during a performance of Rebus: The Long Shadows in Edinburgh in last year.
In a conversation with the Daily Star in January, he revealed an unusual side effect of the illness, telling the publication: “It has clearly not affected my speech or anything like that, but what it has done has affected my emotions, which is most peculiar.
“Two months ago if I was doing an interview you’d have to stop and say: ‘Charlie, go and stand there for two minutes’. It affected me emotionally.”
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