The Entertainers - IAN McSHANE

HIS father played on the wing for Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers before being transferred to Manchester United.

He starred in Dallas, had a love affair with a porn star whose breasts were insured for £5 million and met his second wife through his friendship with soccer wizard George Best.

He survived a 60ft car plunge off a cliff in Egypt, then cleaned up his act after a new love helped put years of womanising and alcoholism behind him.

It all seems a long way from the streets of Blackburn, but this is the true story of a lad born and raised in the heart of East Lancashire.

If you haven't guessed the name yet, we're talking about none other than Ian McShane, the RADA-trained star who stormed British small screens as roguish antiques dealer Lovejoy.

Ian, who made the last episode of the popular BBC series in 1994, is currently rehearsing for a play, The Yield of the Long Bond, at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles.

Ian lived in Freckleton Street, Blackburn, until his father Harry, who played for Rovers in 1950, got his transfer from Wanderers to United. A former pupil of St Luke's C E Primary School, Ian started to follow in his father's footsteps, before a drama teacher at his grammar school in Manchester suggested he should take to the stage rather than the pitch.

Ian, now 55, recalled: "I played football very keenly until I was about 15. But then I realised I wasn't going to be anything special at the game, so I gave up playing it seriously."

Ian starred in 75 episodes of Lovejoy over five years before the series came to an end in 1994.

He made tabloid headlines in 1977 by leaving his second wife Ruth to have a torrid affair with soft porn star Sylvia Kristel, sex siren of the Emmanuelle films.

He married for the third time in 1980 to American actress Gwen Humble, who appeared in the final series of Lovejoy.

His marriage to Gwen helped him leave behind his lifestyle of excess, and he quit the booze and attended a health farm where he stopped smoking cigarettes.

He said: "I started to feel my relationship with Gwen was going to be in bad trouble if I carried on with my heavy drinking.

" I realised that guys around me were dying from abuse, and one morning I woke up and decided I'd had enough."

Ian, who still lives with Gwen in Los Angeles, is getting ready for a film role in a feature length version of science fiction series Babylon Five, as well as developing some of his own ideas for television shows.

Previous news story

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.