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VETERAN actor John Rhys-Davies says he will “never” divorce his wife, despite having found love with his new partner and becoming a dad again.

Susie, the wife of the star of the Indiana Jones adventures and The Lord of the Rings, lives in a private care home in the Isle of Man with severe Alzheimer’s.

John, from Ammanford, became a father for the third time when he was 62, after falling for New Zealand reporter Lisa Manning, 20 years his junior, when she interviewed him about his portrayal of Gimli in The Lord of the Rings.

But despite his new life with Lisa, he has sworn he will never divorce Susie, 78, who developed the debilitating disease more than 25 years ago.

At first, the illness went undiagnosed for several years and Susie would ask endless questions, much to John’s frustration.

It was with great sadness that the actor, who also starred in I, Claudius, spoke to Wales on Sunday of his wife’s decline.

He said: “I was never there for her and she deserved far better than me. She was a remarkable person but I’m afraid I was far too stupid and young to see it.

“I remember the frustration I would feel when she kept asking another set of stupid questions but I just didn’t realise at the time that she was ill.

“My other children are two grown men now. It has been so hard on them, far worse for them than for me.

“I put Susie’s behaviour down to our own problems and thought she was trying to drive me nuts with her inane questions but what she was trying to do was fill the holes in her understanding.

“She stopped being a mum to the boys and was more like a younger sister to them by the time they were in their early teens. It’s been particularly hard for Tom, I think. He was my youngest son and losing your mum like that is a difficult thing.”

John gradually realised his wife was seriously ill and in 1995, when the boys were in their 20s and living away from home, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and he arranged for full-time care at her home.

She now lives in a nursing home on the Isle of Man where John also has a 50-acre farm and sometimes joins John and Lisa for Sunday lunch.

He said: “I promised her that I would always look after her. Before she got very ill, she asked me, ‘What will happen?’ and I said she would probably forget who we all were.

“Obviously she thought that was terrible so I told her no matter what happened we would always know how she was, we would always love her and always care for her.”

Despite grown up children from his marriage to translator Susie, he relished the chance of becoming a dad again so late on in his life.

He said: “My little girl Maia is three this month and she’s brilliant. She is extremely bright, very demanding and quite wonderful.

“There are certainly advantages to being an older parent. I think I have far more patience this time round, I can step back and look at things through a child’s eyes without that awful sense of panic.

“She wasn’t a surprise, despite my age. There were plenty of sniggers and giggles from acquaintances wondering what I’d got myself into. But when I met my partner Lisa and we got together she made no secret of the fact that, at 40, she was in it for the long haul.

“And I have no regrets. Maia is a beautiful child, and gets on famously with her brothers, my grown up sons Ben and Tom. She is very close to my youngest Tom. He’s 40 now and is living over in New Zealand with us at the moment. He adores her and they are howlingly funny when they are together.

“I feel blessed that I’ve had the chance to do it all again. With my first two, I had to be totally focussed on work and career but that’s not the case anymore. When Maia was first born and I was sitting with her howling on my lap at 4am I have to confess at asking myself just how I got this lucky.

“To experience the unique sense of elation that you have when your child is sleeping on your chest in an incomparable emotion. I’m just so lucky to experience that again.

“I think your children are your measure of success, regardless of work and career.

“If I had not been given grandchildren, which I have, I would have considered myself a complete failure. You can only measure yourself on the quality of your offspring.”

But while John lives a seemingly carefree life with his new partner and little girl, he said he was hugely frustrated by the current economic situation, and what he called the “poor state we are in” and would happily give up his acting career for life as an MP.

He said: “With the state of our country as it is, I would seriously consider becoming an MP, even if it meant I had to give up my beloved acting. It’s not something I’m ruling out. I would come back to Ammanford and stand as an independent candidate.

“I love this country we live in and it needs people who love it, not themselves, to run the country. The way I see it, the Government has lost control of our borders, and we have lost control of our government. It has lost control of our streets, it has fostered a moral collapse through encouraging younger drinking and failed in its drug policies.

“It has talked tough on crime, fudges the figures and failed to build enough prison cells to cope with the crimewave it has fostered. Our education system has been eviscerated, standards inflated to the point where nobody trusts national standards anymore, and good teachers are abandoning them for foreign alternatives.

“I could go on. We face at least 15 years of tough times because the Government failed to supervise the financial sector with due diligence. It made no provision for the unexpected, and continues to spend taxpayers’ money with the abandon of a hooker shopping on stolen credit cards.

“People have become disillusioned with Parliament and that threatens democracy. I think the career politician, with his eye on a second career/ benefits/ pension in Europe after his time in the Commons cannot serve his people honestly.

“No-one should be allowed to stand for Parliament without proof that he has taken responsibility for other people. If you stand for a Party, the Party should pay for you, and be responsible for your pension. We need more parliamentarians with experience of life, independent of thought and affiliation, who regard service in Parliament as a temporary duty, not as a career. We need people who love their country.”

But, despite his strong views, for now, John said he was relishing some rare time off with his little girl and partner.

He said: “I’m waiting to start filming a little film I wanted to be in, not because it’s a big studio movie, but because it’s about a little girl who leaves home to be in the circus with her pet elephant.

“I want to be in a film she can watch and enjoy, rather than be an unrecognisable hairy dwarf!”