My adored adopted brothers have blown my mind and swollen my pride

For Don’s show, the revue From the Heart, I travelled, for the first night, a mere 35 minutes to the Garrick Theatre.

It was filled with people who love and admire this man. His autobiography, The Sanest Guy In The Room, says it all.

He watches from the sidelines of celebrity, shakes his head sagely and goes home to channel it into his seminal lyrics.

Who could forget his song Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad from the musical Tell Me On A Sunday, summing up an English take on California Dreamin’. He pushes boats out but always with a line attached.

Towards the second half of the show, after Clive Rowe breaks our hearts singing “I’d go to bed earlier than I do if I knew I’d dream of you,” honouring Don’s late, beloved wife of 60 years, Shirley, he then doubles us up with songs of resilience and humour about two reformed drinkers.

Then, after fervent nods to his back catalogue of Bond hits and forever standards such as Born Free and To Sir with Love, he walks on stage to a standing ovation.

I am told this because I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see if it really was Don or I just had enlarged floaters in my eyes. He came on nightly, urbane and adorable, and never was an ovation more deserved.

Playwright Martin Sherman (Lia Toby/Getty Images for BFI)Getty Images for BFI

Two days later found my husband – I do love saying that – and I on the plane to Edinburgh to see Martin Sherman’s new play I’ll Be Seeing You, about a playwright trying to fulfil a commission to write a play about Liberace. It was playing at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

I’ve knocked British Airways before and will do again but the sardines-in-seats policy was only lightened by a darling of a steward, who gave me a glass of bubbly to take away the pain.

Honestly though, by the time you get to Heathrow shopping centre with optional flights, and by the time you queue up, in an order designed by someone whose normal job is planting mazes, and by the time you wait while they remove your hair lacquer from your handbag and board and eat the packet of dried nuts and wait in line for a taxi into town – I say fly the train every time.

Which is how we returned. On a Sunday and perfectly on time.

Now Sherman’s autobiography is called On the Boardwalk, and it is sensational. Truly. No one would publish it until independent publishers Inkandescent came along – remember, James Joyce had 18 refusals on Ulysses – and it is a prizewinner.

Martin’s silent, distant mother had Huntington’s chorea, which is hereditary, so until he was 30 he thought he was living under a death threat. In fact, at 30, his first trail-blazing play, Bent (about a homosexual relationship in a concentration camp), was playing on Broadway. On the Boardwalk is a stunning read.

His next play was Messiah about the false Messiah Shabtai Tzvi, and I was fortunate enough to play the female lead at Hampstead Theatre and then in the West End.

That’s when we became brother and sister. He is gentle, tall and rather stately. He floats into a room with the grace and suspicion of a heron.

His play Rose was written with me in mind but at 40, I felt too young for the role of an 80 year old.

Two years later I was giving my Beattie in the BT commercials and trapped to a life of, “Ooh, ‘ave you still got an ‘ology?” I eventually played Rose during Covid, then on Sky TV and finally at Park Theatre and the New Ambassadors.

It was, for me, the peak of my career. Like a Jack Rosenthal script, the words sat in my mouth as though I was conjuring them myself. After the first run of the play at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester, Martin just said: “Bliss.’’

Now, here we were going to Pitlochry to see him on stage, playing himself, at the final moments of his bonkers masterpiece I’ll Be Seeing You and once again I am sobbing into a fabric sample I happen to have in my bag.

Simon Russell Beale is an actor who could breathe life into an MFI wardrobe and he dazzles as the pompadoured performer. It is pure showbiz with an aching heart as big as a piano.

Throughout the play, the young, fit, sexually promiscuous writer accuses Liberace of lying about his true sexuality.

But these were times when it was illegal to love your own sex and he throws the question back at the blocked writer – so who’s lying now?

The writer has to admit he is an old man and that’s where Fra Fee, playing the young writer, disappears and the real writer, Martin Sherman, comes on. And understands. When he lays his head on Liberace’s shoulder, my chest started heaving.

So, thank you Martin and thank you Don and thank you Geoff Morrow who wrote the music for one of Don’s best songs, Things a Woman Shouldn’t Do, beautifully rendered by Shona McGarty in From The Heart.

I am already blessed with a blood brother Geoffrey, who is an eco-warrior professor, and now, three adored adopted brothers who, in one fell swoop of a week, have blown my mind and swollen my pride.

As for my word of the week, “resilience”, well, at the Women Of The Year lunch Diane Kenwood, the chairwoman, gave us one of the most moving lunches of the 30-odd I have attended.

She is a vibrant speaker and her speech was relayed by phone to her ailing mother, fellow committee member of WOTY for many years, the indomitable Lady Ruth Morris CBE.

Three days later, Ruth died. She was the first woman to be made partner at a City law firm and a campaigner for women’s rights for half a century.

The Woman of Courage Award was won by Gisele Pelicot. We were all given a badge saying “Shame Has to Change Sides. A hymn to life” (the title of her extraordinary memoir). Talk to me about resilience!