The heartbreak and shame of watching the father you adore drink himself to death Kate Elphick relives her famous father's alcoholism in her new book She reveals how her father planned to kill himself on his 50th birthday The actor made famous by hit Eighties show Boon died in 2002 after suffering a heart attack Kate Elphick recalls the shame and embarrassment of her father's fame and alcoholism in her new book, Michael Elphick: The Great Pretender Shortly before his 50th birthday, actor Michael Elphick told his only child, Kate, that he intended to mark his half century by committing suicide. When he summoned his daughter to outline his birthday plans, she had assumed there would be talk of a party. Instead, he made a bleak declaration of intent. "He said, "On my birthday, I'm going to kill myself,"" she recalls. He told me he had a gun, and that I'd be better off without him. "Before I could even draw breath, he was gesturing expansively round the room like an estate agent, telling me, "All this will be yours, and my house in Portugal," as if that would make up for not having a dad. He genuinely seemed to feel he was doing the right thing by me. He was trying to sell the idea, and that's what made me so angry. Everything got very heated. I suppose I should have put my arms around him and reassured him that I didn't want to lose him, but I was livid. Only two years earlier, when I was 20, Mum had died of cancer. Now Dad was calmly telling me that I was going to be an orphan - but that it would all be okay because I'd inherit his estate. In the event, Elphick did not kill himself. And Kate realised that years of heavy drinking had brought her father - who remains crystallised in the collective memory as Boon in the eponymous Eighties ITV series - to the brink of despair, and he needed help, not recriminations. His birthday, in fact, proved a happy occasion. He spent it with Kate and close friends - among them his Boon co-star Neil Morrissey - in the West End, where he was playing Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion. After the play, Kate was introduced for the first time to her father's girlfriend, TV floor manager Liz Summers. The two women struck up an instant rapport, and that evening they colluded in a plan to cajole Elphick into going to The Priory to be treated for his alcoholism. Reluctantly he agreed, and Kate paid for her father's two-month sojourn at the clinic with a £12,000 inheritance from her mother. However, Elphick's enforced spell of sobriety was transient. Returning home, he fell quickly into his old drinking routine. The daily assault on his body was brutal. Often he'd collapse, get carted off to hospital and patched up, only to return home and instantly start boozing again. Kate recalls how her father, Michael Elphick, died in 2002 from a heart attack after a night of drinking with his friends Inevitably, his health declined sharply, and in his last television role, as debauched paedophile Harry Slater on EastEnders, he looked appropriately paunchy and unkempt. But Elphick's mood lifted even as his health declined, and in his final months his life had evolved into a peaceable routine. He shared his rambling Victorian home in North-West London with Liz, Kate, her partner Luke and Kate's daughter Jasmine - but he never kicked the habit that eventually killed him. "The day before Dad died [in September 2002], he'd just come out of hospital after a collapse," recalls Kate. Luke and I had gone to collect him in the car, and as we slowed down to turn a corner, he opened the car door, hopped out of the passenger seat and strolled off to his favourite bar. "Luke said, "You have to go and get him," but I knew it would be useless. I'd tried everything: crying, screaming, emotional blackmail, the silent treatment. I'd reached a point where I was exhausted by the arguing. And actually I'm glad I didn't create a scene, because that was his last ever night out. All his mates just happened to turn up at the bar and he stayed out until 1.30 am. He'd had a top night. He'd gone to bed, but that morning at about 5 am I was woken by the noise of him groaning and crying out in agony. When I went into him, his face was contorted with pain. Kate called an ambulance and kissed her dad as he was taken off. It was to be their last goodbye. Kate Elphick has written the book in remarkable candour alongside an old family friend He put his hand round my waist and gave my back a little rub. The skin on his hands was papery and rough. I can recall the gesture, the sensation, even now," she says. Elphick died in hospital from a massive heart attack. He was 55. The relationship Kate shared with him was - like that of any child of an alcoholic father - a complex one, and she charts it in a new book, Michael Elphick: The Great Pretender, that she has co-written with an old family friend, Nigel Denison. The book is remarkable for its candour. Kate is both honest and unsentimental about the childhood embarrassment, the shame and frustration that came with having a father who was not only famous but also an epic boozer. "Dad's drinking was my dirty secret," she says. As a child, I didn't want my friends to come round in case he was drunk. They found him hilarious, entertaining - he was always a good-humoured drunk, although he could become boring and sentimental - but I was mortified by his behaviour. Kate was a shy adolescent, lacking in confidence and marked out as different by her middle-class accent. She attended a state comprehensive school near the family home in Willesden, where her classmates clamoured to be associated with her because of her father's fame. She hated the attention, and his drinking only compounded her discomfiture. "My school often asked Dad to attend events, but I never wanted him to," she recalls. Once, he did. He went to a concert at the Festival Hall, where the school choir was performing. He was rolling drunk and there was this blameless Asian tourist taking snaps of landmarks outside. Dad thought he was a paparazzo and started giving him what for. My mum was distraught. She was hissing at him, "Leave him alone. He's just a tourist. Everyone from school saw it and I was just mortified. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Elphick was an erratic and unreliable parent, frequently absent from his daughter's young life. Kate remembers the awkwardness of family mealtimes: her mother Julia often seething with suppressed fury, her father babbling inanely to fill the frozen silences. "There was no shouting, just an atmosphere, and even as a young child I could feel it," she says. Sometimes Dad would promise to come home and just not show up. I remember hearing the word "alcoholic" and wondering if it applied to him. Michael Elphick remains crystallised in the collective memory as Ken Boon in the eponymous Eighties TV series But I never grew up feeling let down by him. Mum could have told me it was more important for him to drink than be with us. But she never did. Despite her father's failings, Kate palpably adored him. I have lots of positive, lovely memories, too. When I was little, before his drinking escalated, he'd make up amazing stories, and he'd stage puppet shows. He created this fantastical world in his imagination, peopled by kings and queens and an octopus who lived down a well. Elphick was also a remarkable and often underrated actor, whose ascent to stardom in 1986 as tough guy Boon - his most populist and popular role - coincided with Kate's early adolescence. Boon also marked the start of her father's commitment both to alcohol and womanising. His absences away filming facilitated his indiscretions. Meanwhile his partner, Kate's mother Julia Alexander - tall, willowy, beautiful, and also loyal and resolutely unstarry - detested the limelight and pub culture in equal measure. A teacher, Julia was the childhood sweetheart to whom Elphick remained famously unmarried for more than three decades. He met her when he was 16 and she 18, and until she died of cancer, aged 50, in 1996, he remained devoted to her in his own peculiar way. Kate recalls how her mother Julia Alexander (pictured) hated the limelight and pub culture that was so loved by her father Kate recalls that after her father's death, a string of former girlfriends sent letters claiming special relationships with him. She was sceptical. "There were numerous letters, and that's putting it mildly, from women telling me he was an important part of their lives," she says. "Even now, 11 years after Dad's death, they're still coming out of the woodwork saying, "Oh, but your father and me . . ." Whatever. I've no idea what his relationship with these other women was. I don't want to think about it. It's not for me to know. But I do know that Dad was a man who couldn't say "no," whether to women, to charities, or to another drink. And I also believe he genuinely cared about my mum, until the day she died. It wasn't a conventional relationship, but Mum knew he was there. She was strong and independent, and she accepted that their lives had gone in separate directions. But Mum and I represented something solid and good in Dad's life; something positive and irreplaceable. For that reason, he never let that go. So Mum always knew he was there, and vice versa. Until the end, they cared about each other and shared an incredible bond of love and respect. At the pinnacle of his roistering, celebrity stories regularly appeared in the more lurid newspapers trumpeting Elphick's affairs. At the time, Julia, who was fully aware of his dalliances, remained both dignified and uncensorious, as she also did about his drinking. She never railed against him privately or publicly. Her objective, it seems, was to keep life as ordered, tranquil and happy as it could be for their daughter. Kate, 38, now grapples to find precisely the right words to describe her parents" brand of love. "Had Mum and Dad been married, they would certainly have divorced," she says now. As it was, they just had this . . . call it a relationship, with me always there in the middle. There was never any hatred or anger between them. Mum never vented her frustration in front of me, and everyone knew that Dad would never "leave" Mum because we represented something so important. They just found a way of making it . . .  Her voice trails off, unable quite to add the word "work." "Let's just say it was unconventional," she concludes. Michael Elphick went on to play Harry Slater, a romantic interest for character Peggy Mitchell in Eastenders Kate also remembers joyous times with her dad, most notably the four years of his sobriety when she was aged 13 to 17. He'd been given an ultimatum by his bosses at Boon: dry out or ship out, and he'd chosen (temporarily) to do the former. During that time, there was one notable holiday Kate and some friends shared with him at her parents" home in Portugal. Dad and I had these wonderful conversations. We could talk about anything - the possibility of life on other planets, philosophy, religion - and he was just such a deep and intelligent thinker. He was compassionate and so charismatic. He had chutzpah and sparkle. He was just the best company, and whenever he told a story everyone would be enthralled. He was a great friend more than anything, but he was never a father figure. Even when he was sober, he wasn't a dad who parented. When Elphick fell off the wagon - she has no idea what prompted him to start drinking again, and there is probably no cogent explanation - Kate was distraught. She was in Portugal again when she was confronted by his relapse. "I was on holiday," she recalls. It was late afternoon and I was walking up the hill with some friends. I just saw this guy leaning against a wall. He was propping himself up, struggling to stand. It took me a few minutes to realise it was Dad. I had no idea that he was drinking again, or even that he was in Portugal. Then I saw his face. He looked mortified, crushed; so apologetic. I was totally shocked. "I thought, "Oh God, here we go again." I remember it all so clearly. I didn't shout and he didn't say anything. He just made a hasty retreat. I didn't see him again that holiday. I wasn't angry with him. I just felt gutted, and so very sad for him. There was also this huge sense of loss that I'd had that great relationship with him snatched away again. I'm not a crier, but I cried then. Not in front of Dad, but later in front of my friends. In his last television role in Eastenders the years of heavy drinking had a visible effect on his paunchy and unkempt appearance Three years later, Kate's mum - the solid, dependable lynchpin of her young life - died after successive recurrences of the cancer which first appeared in her breast when Kate was a baby. Kate, heartbroken, soldiered on as her father slid further into dependency and despair. "I think Dad felt very lonely and insecure, especially after Mum died," she says. The arrival of Liz melded them - temporarily at least - into the family unit they never quite were when Julia was alive, and Elphick belatedly settled into a quiet routine of domesticity and daily drinking until the end of his life. Four years after his death, Kate moved to his house in the Algarve where she now lives with Luke and children Jasmine, 14, and Jude, ten. She works as a riding instructor, and she and Luke also run a construction company. She is straightforward, likeable and utterly unsentimental. Kate has not wept either for her mum or her dad since their deaths, but she has mourned inordinately. "If I let the floodgates open, I don't know where it would take me," she explains. But I've done a lot of grieving. I always felt very protective of Mum and Dad. The cancer, their relationship, the drinking . . . There is no pity for herself: from an early age, Kate learned to be a coper. When I ask what she misses most about her dad she says simply: "His companionship." And a single, over-arching sadness abides. "I just wish he could have found something to take the place of drink in his life," she says.