Father who deserted family was tortured soul, admits Martin Clunes Clunes, who lives with his wife, Philippa, a television producer, and daughter, Emily, in Beaminster, Dorset, had believed his father was simply away working. The 50 year-old also said that his late mother, Daphne, defended her husband, despite their abandonment. "Because she worshipped him," he said. She was very stage-struck, till her dying day. She would talk about actors and say 'Oh so and so was wonderful in such and such. "And I'd say, 'But he was a complete b------ who hit his wife," and she would say, 'I know, but he was a marvellous Hamlet!" That would sort of let actors off. Clunes said actors could get away with almost anything as long as "they'd given a good Iago." He has previously spoken about his father while appearing on BBC Radio 4"s Desert Island Discs, where he said he was "forced" to go to boarding school after his death. "I really hated it," he said. "I was a weekly boarder and had this weekly agony of crying in the car all the way, and Mum would cry all the way back on her own," he told The Sunday Times. He claimed his family had been told he would become gay if he remained at home without the male role model. Alec Clunes, a classical actor, died in 1970, aged 57. He had played numerous roles on the stage, including Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, and appeared in films including Laurence Olivier's Richard III, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and The Adventures of Quentin Durward. Martin Clunes, who runs a farm in Beaminster, where he rescues abandoned and ill-treated horses and hosts an annual country fair to raise money for charity, is due to return to television soon with a new series of Doc Martin, in which he plays a surgeon and new father.