In a rare interview, actress Shelia Hancock has revealed how she was ’sexually rabid’ as a 14-year-old, and only a lack of contraception stopped her being promiscuous.
The 77-year-old said she had been ‘desperate for sex’ as an adolescent and as early as the age of 14, reports the Telegraph.
In an interview with the Radio Times, published on Friday, Hancock recalled how she met a local boy on a trip to France in 1947 and ‘fell in love’ with him.
She said the young Frenchman, who resembled the late American actor Danny Kaye, was the first boy she kissed.
But instead of ‘enjoying it’ she said she had become ‘anguished’ by the fear of becoming pregnant.
“Looking back at my teen diaries, it’s obvious that at 14 I was sexually rabid, desperate for sex,” Hancock said.
“But (I was) much too frightened because in those days there was no Pill and the great fear for girls of my background was that you’d get pregnant.
‘As it is, all we did was kiss,” she added.
The actress said the experience of falling for the Frenchman also taught her that ‘things are generally not black and white’.
The star of ‘Cabaret and Sister Act the West End’ musicals said that despite having had an early sexual awakening herself she worried that the current generation of young people were being ‘pressured into’ sex.
“Nowadays many children are at it younger than 14. And I worry they’re being pressured into it,” she said.
“There’s a lovely stage of innocence that is essential to one’s development and to be constantly battered with the fact that you’ve got to have it off with somebody or as many people as possible, and if you’re not you’re a wimp, is awfully sad,” she added.
“But on the other hand I think a false puritanism is equally phoney,” the star added.
Hancock said she now regretted that she had not been advised to enjoy childhood because she ‘lost that in the rush and tear and push and shove of teenage life’.
During her teenage years, ‘ambition blinded’ her and she was constantly pressured by her adored father to ‘be the best’ rather than achieving her best.
She said she had been ‘lucky enough to love two men profoundly’ – Alec Ross, her first husband who died in 1971, and John Thaw, her second husband, the star of ‘Inspector Morse’ who died of cancer in 2002.
