David Jason found out about daughter he didn't know existed from letter - what it said

Sir David Jason has described a bewildering cascade of ­emotions when he received “the most astonishing letter” from the daughter he never knew he had.

He recalls how his hands shook when he first found out he might have a daughter he didn’t know existed for 52 years, experiencing “wonder and amazement, through anxiety and heartache, to fear and outright panic”.

The revealed last year how TV legend David had met up with Abi Harris and his new grandson Charlie after a paternity test confirmed he had a second daughter from a brief relationship with the late actress Jennifer Hill.

In his new book he gives more extraordinary details and shares his emotion that he was not part of Abi’s life sooner saying there is “the pang of sadness for those missing years, all that lost time”.

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Taking the emotional story back to the start in new memoir This Time Next Year, David says that a letter arrived from Abi.

Starting gently, and referencing the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood, it said: “To begin at the beginning, well actually, at my beginning. I wonder whether it has ever crossed your mind, as it has done with Mum and more recently with me, that you might be my biological father?”

David, best known for playing Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, was reading the letter in his kitchen at home and says shocked did not begin to cover his feelings on seeing the handwritten words on the page.

Abi went on to say her “paternity is uncertain” and while she was not looking for any financial support, would David agree “to take an anonymous paternity test so that I can finally know the truth and let the matter rest”.

David recalls: “You will be unsurprised to learn that my hands were shaking by now. What had I just read? I had to go back and read the whole thing again. And then I had to read it again. And then again after that.

“I have to say it really hadn’t crossed my mind that Abi Harris was my daughter – that my relationship with Jennifer Hill while we were in that production of Under Milk Wood in 1970 could have produced a child without me knowing about it.

“At no point in the nearly fifty years that had gone by since then had that thought had cause to enter my head.”

David then spoke with his wife Lady Gill who was stunned and both of them re-read the letter several times. Their overriding emotion was sympathy for Abi and her turmoil.

“So naturally I should agree to do the test,” David writes. “And if the test came back positive, then we should meet Abi and open our arms to her. I am so grateful that Gill was so supportive and understanding about it all.”

The acclaimed actor goes on to confirm the test proved she was his daughter and they first met in a London hotel.

He added: “I’ve never experienced such a jumble of competing emotions. We were both feeling them. There was a lot of elation kind of, ‘Can you believe it?’ and, ‘What an amazing thing!’.

“But there was an inevitable sense of distance too, and a pang of sadness for those missing years, all that lost time. So strange to feel this instant intimacy between the two of you, this obvious bond, and, at the same time, to be aware of this gap between you: so much common ground, and yet all that ground uncovered.”

David also has a daughter, Sophie, with his wife Lady Gill and he says: “I held Sophie straight after she was born, and I fed her and changed her and walked her to school and watched her grow, and all of those things.

“And that’s what I think of when I think of Sophie being my daughter.

“But Abi and I, of course, never had that chance, which is sad in itself, and now here she was, entering my life for the first time, but as a grown woman.

“In those first minutes it was such a complicated thing to process, for us both.”

The pair are now close and regularly meet up along with Abi’s son Charlie, ’s first grandchild.

On an interview with ­Breakfast he joked about Charlie’s nickname being “Charlie the hair” and with a laugh he explained: “I call him Charlie the hair, yeah. He’s a good looking lad. Unfortunately, he’s got a lot of hair.

“I’m not sure that he’s quite as amused as I am, with calling him Charlie the hair, but he has, he’s just got so much long hair, and I get jealous. I’m terrifically jealous of him, and it’s all brown and everything, and mine’s not brown, and there’s very little of it.”

And he praised his wife for helping to navigate the new situation with a blended family. He added: “My wife has been a tremendous help in this direction, and she’s been extremely supportive. Without that I don’t think I could have managed, quite honestly.

“But because of Gill’s reaction and her ability to understand, it’s been a remarkable achievement on all our behalf. It’s positive and it’s the journey, not the arrival, and it’s the fun of the journey.

“And that’s just another part of life’s rich pattern, or life’s rich journey that it throws at you.”

The book also reveals how sadly Abi’s mum died last year a few months after finding out David was Abi’s father. But she at least knew the paternity question had been answered.

“I very much hope that she was relieved to know that Abi had finally learned the truth of her beginning and that Jenny could rest in peace,” says David.

And David’s book also praised the Mirror’s “sympathetic” journalist who first broke the story in 2023.

At the time Sir David told the Mirror: “To say it was a surprise to find out I had a daughter from years ago is an understatement.

“However, on settling with the news, I am delighted that I am now able to get to know Abi and so we meet up when we can.

“My wife, Gill, and daughter, Sophie, have been very supportive and understanding and have embraced Abi and welcomed her and her young son into her now wider family.”

Sir David and Jennifer’s relationship began at the start of 1970, when he was 30.

They had both starred in Thomas’s Under Milk Wood at London’s May Fair theatre, with David later appearing in a film version of the classic. In a bizarre turn of events, they were reunited in 2008 for a reprisal of the play which also starred Abi – so the family were all part of the same production, yet unaware of their relation.

“Had we but known it,” he notes.

Jennifer, who has appeared in and Bond movie Octopussy, died last summer.

“I very much hope that she was relieved to know that Abi had finally learned the truth of her beginning,” he adds.

On BBC Breakfast he recalled: “It was a girlfriend, and that part I never knew about it. I went off to work in the theatre, and the girlfriend went off to work in her theatre, and that was the end of it really.”

The pair did stay in touch through a shared circle of friends. Abi was born in October 1970.

Abi and Sir David have crossed paths several times through mutual friends but he had no idea they were related.

Jennifer was married to screen star Geoffrey Davion, who appeared in Miss Marple and The Stars Look Down, and Abi believed he was her father until his death in 1996.

*This Time Next Year, the 2024 memoir by David Jason, is out now, published by Penguin.

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