William Cook

Lin Cook, who died before Christmas, personified that odd breed: the celebrity widow

Amid the flurry of famous deaths during 2016, one particular passing has been more or less forgotten. Peter Cook’s third and final wife, Lin Cook, died on the eve of Advent, at the age of 71, shortly after the BBC broadcast Victor Lewis-Smith’s new documentary about Peter, for which Lin gave a rare interview. I got to know Lin in the Noughties, while compiling two biographical collections of her late husband’s work. It was an intriguing insight into the world of that strange showbiz phenomenon, the celebrity widow. Celebrity widows are a paradox – ostensibly public people, they’re actually intensely private. Lin personified this odd breed. Although I was in touch with her for over 15 years, when she died I realised I barely knew her at all.

I first met Lin in 2000, when I was invited to her home in Perrins Walk, a cobbled mews off Hampstead High Street where Peter had lived until his death, in 1995, aged 58. I’d heard a lot about this Queen Anne coach house, which Peter had bought in 1973, at the height of his success. This was the setting for the lost years that followed the collapse of his partnership with Dudley Moore, and the breakdown of his second marriage, to Judy Huxtable. If you believed what the papers said, until Peter met Lin this house had been spectacularly untidy, if not downright seedy. Yet whatever happened here in the past, Lin had since made it spick and span.

When I arrived at Perrins Walk, I realised this was an audition. Lin wanted to publish an anthology of Peter’s work, and she wanted to see if I was the right man to edit it. I’d never met Peter Cook, and my two previous books had both been about so-called ‘alternative comedians’, many of whom weren’t even born when Peter was in his prime.

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