John Thaw: Is there life after Inspector Morse?

On 20 June this year, the front pages of Britain's broadsheet papers were dominated by a report on how alleged incompetence by Railtrack had cost 31 lives, and by an arms-race warning from Russian premier Vladimir Putin. But The Sun had a more arresting front-page splash – "Morse Fights Cancer".

Middle England was aghast, and so were the suits at ITV, who had no greater talisman in the increasingly fierce ratings battle with the BBC than Inspector Morse's alter ego, 59-year-old actor John Thaw.

Diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Thaw has since kept an understandably low profile. Last week, however, he released a short statement, saying, "I am getting through the worst of it, and look forward to getting back to work." We can only guess at the pain, both physical and emotional, that this simple statement conceals. But we do know that Thaw, the son of a lorry driver from Burnage, the Manchester suburb which also spat out the Gallagher brothers, is a tough cookie. And that his wife of 28 years, Sheila Hancock, could hardly be more empathetic, having herself survived breast cancer. She quit her role as Barbara Owen in EastEnders to nurse him.

My encounter with Thaw takes place before all this, in the cosy lounge of a hotel in west London, our brief to discuss an ITV drama called Buried Treasure. He plays a wealthy Manchester businessman whose estranged daughter is killed in a car crash, leaving him to care for a mixed-race granddaughter he didn't even know he had. Together, they try to find the girl's father. And, as usual, Thaw fleshes out his character by drawing on memories of his own father.

"In this case, it is his manner of speaking, the way he gets ideas across. Also, I found myself relating to how my father would have felt in that situation. It's as if I had died and he had been left with Joanna [Thaw's daughter with Hancock; they also have a daughter each from previous marriages, and all three are actresses]."

John Thaw senior continues, nearly five years after his death – from cancer, poignantly enough – to influence his elder son's career. "When I am offered a part, I am more likely to do it if I think he has certain qualities that remind me of the old man," Thaw says. Moreover, Buried Treasure's theme of a young child losing her mother must strike a chord with him, for his own mother walked out on the family – Thaw, his father, and his brother, Ray – when he was seven, leaving to live with another man.

Ray Thaw – who now lives in Brisbane, Australia – has no doubt that his beloved brother's personality was formed by their mother's abrupt departure. They never saw her again. "And it made him very tough on the outside," Ray tells me. "He decided that nobody was going to harm us again, that we would survive no matter what." For Hancock, however, the event, subsequently described by Thaw as "the awfulness", had a different significance. "To trust women has been difficult for him," she says.

After his mother left, the most influential female in his life was his grandmother, his father's mother, Vera, who lived a short bus journey away in West Gorton, alongside Bellevue Zoo. "She was very extrovert, to the extent of dressing up in silly clothes for a laugh," he recalls. "So was my mother, from what I remember. And I was a show-off, too, as a child.

"I've had it knocked out of me since becoming an actor, because I have always thought of acting as a very serious business. If you ask anyone who has worked with me, they will tell you that I carry the script around with me like my last will and testament. So I've become more and more introverted, although having said that, I'm getting slightly more outgoing now." He pauses. A conversation with him is peppered with long pauses. And then chuckles. "Slightly," he emphasises.

I can scarcely imagine, I say, what a culture shock it must have been for a Burnage lad to arrive at Rada on a scholarship in the late 1950s; one of his classmates, just to rub it in, was the frightfully well-spoken Sarah Miles. Another chuckle. And Thaw tells me how his dad couldn't afford the train fare from Manchester, so how they all piled into his Uncle Charlie's old Ford Thames van – him, his dad, Ray, Charlie, and Charlie's daughter Sandra. They dropped him off near Rada, at the corner of Gower Street. "And the first person I saw was a student going up the two steps into Rada with an overcoat over his shoulders, a real cliché of an actor luvvie. I thought, 'My God, it's true.'"

Thaw himself has always been the antithesis of this cliché, yet the embodiment of another one, the Billy Elliot cliché of the blunt working-class Northerner finding his vocation in London in the "poofy" arts. Ray Thaw fuels this by telling me how proud he and his father were when John won his scholarship. "I remember us going to watch him on stage in London for the first time. Chips With Everything, I think it was. When he came on I felt like standing up and screaming, 'That's my brother!' But Dad calmed me down. He whispered to me, 'If we keep quiet, we might hear what people say about him.'" Bless.

Thaw's career took off quickly. In 1964, aged 22, he landed his first lead role on television, playing a military policeman in a series called Redcap. A year earlier, in a play called Semi-Detached, he understudied his hero, Laurence Olivier.

"I used to watch him like a hawk from the wings," he says. "And when he told me that he was taking a week off, I said, 'I'm 21, playing a man of 65. I'll never get away with it.' He said: 'Do what I do, baby. Amaze yourself with your own daring.'"

This he has been doing ever since. The swaggering aggression of The Sweeney's Jack Regan – the role that made him famous – was nothing like his real self. He had more in common with the introspective, opera-loving Morse. Indeed, when I ask what makes him emotional, he identifies classical music. "Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Sibelius... the brilliance, the genius of it. Was it Lenin who said, 'Who could create such beauty whilst living in this vile hell?' Music does that for me, too."

Introspective as he is, Thaw's co-stars, from Dennis Waterman to Sarah Lancashire, talk about him with unbridled affection. Lancashire had such misgivings about her character in The Glass, a recent ITV drama that normally she might have turned down the part. She took it because it meant working with Thaw for the first time. The experience did not disappoint. "He's delightful," she reported.

And the woman who knows him best of all confirms this. Thaw relaxes most when they are at their home in Provence, says Hancock (they also have homes in London and Wiltshire).

"He does make me laugh after all these years. He has a great sense of the ridiculous, and we sit [at Provençal cafés] fantasising about the people who pass, building whole worlds for them. We give them names, jobs, love affairs, and John goes off on these Eddie Izzard flights of fancy. He's a brilliant mimic."

Thaw has rarely played comedy, although in the sitcom Home to Roost, which ran on ITV from 1985 to 1989, he proved himself adept at it. He has, in fact, only endured one major critical failure, the 1994 turkey A Year In Provence. This is a subject which gets his hackles rising even now; he felt that the criticism was not so much misconceived as absurdly disproportionate.

Still, he should worry. He is reportedly paid £2m a year by ITV. "If they think I am worth that to them, then great," he says. "I'm not embarrassed by the size of it, because I think I'm worth it, dare I say. I've been acting since 1960, so they're getting 40 years of experience, and they know I won't short-change them." They might know that, but he needs frequent reminders. "Even now I am constantly trying to prove to myself that I can do it," he adds, "that I am entitled to be where I am."

Where he is, right now, is enjoying a gilded career, latterly with a gilded pay packet, and as he fights cancer, with the hopes and prayers of Middle England behind him. When they lost Morse, his fans grieved. And Morse's death affected Thaw, too. "Seeing yourself on a mortuary slab pulls you up," he said with unwitting prescience. "It reminds you of your own mortality."

'Buried Treasure' is on ITV on Sunday at 8pm