Only Fools and Horses star Sir David Jason’s sweet bond with daughter after becoming a first time dad at 61
The sitcom actor shares his grown-up daughter with wife Gill Hinchcliffe
Only Fools and Horses star Sir David Jason once made a candid admission about the highs and lows of being an older dad. The Del Boy star, 83, and his wife Gill Hinchcliffe, welcomed their first child, daughter Sophie, together on February 26, 2001.
David and Gill tied the knot in a secret ceremony in 2005 after meeting on a TV set back in 1995. At the time, David said: “We got married yesterday at The Dorchester in a most beautiful suite. It was intimate and very romantic. Some of the guests didn’t even know. It was a very low-key surprise.”
The sitcom star become a first time parent at the age of 61. David is a doting dad to Sophie Mae and even has a sweet nickname for his 22-year-old daughter.
But, David has been honest and open about raising Sophie and being a much older father. In a candid admission, he said: “I never thought I would. My father used to say, ‘What the hell are you listening to? Put that bloody rubbish off.’
“And it was The Beatles, [but Sophie will] be watching Hannah Montana, and I hear myself saying, ‘What’s that rubbish you’re watching?'”
He’d also said: “I suppose the thing that you miss, perhaps, is being able to do all the things a younger father would do with their child. But Sophie is lovely – when she was a baby and a small child, she was so funny, it was sheer delight. I still call her ‘the warf’, because she loved Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but she couldn’t say the ‘D’. Even now, I’ll say, ‘Where’s the warfling?’, and my wife will say, ‘Oh, she’s gone out’.”
The beloved actor who also made a name for himself on the shows A Touch of Frost and Open All Hours, said that it was his wife Gill who encourage him to work less and spend more time with Sophie. “I was told by the female department, ‘You must stop this, you’re not spending enough time at home with your small child.’ So now I have two months at least between projects,” he said.
“I suppose the thing that you miss, perhaps, is being able to do all the things a younger father would do with their child.”
