To millions of television viewers he was the definitive Doctor Who, battling Daleks and Cybermen every Saturday teatime during the late Sixties.
What no one could have guessed was that veteran actor Patrick Troughton was living a secret double life with a second family and constantly feared he would be exposed.
By the time the star took over from William Hartnell to become the second Time Lord in 1966, he had left his wife Margaret and three young children to start a new home with his girlfriend Ethel “Bunny” Nuens.
He guarded his deception so carefully that Troughton’s own mother died unaware that the marriage had ended.
Now Troughton’s son Michael, himself an actor, has revealed the family secrets in a biography of his father.
“Life was more complicated than dad would like to admit even to close friends,” said Michael, 57, who played Sir Piers Fletcher-Dervish in the Eighties comedy The New Statesman. “The truth is that he had two families by the time he did Doctor Who.”
