PATSY KENSIT: My Dad's gangland past

THE actress thought she knew all about her late father, until she traced her family for a TV programme and discovered the real extent of his links with London’s most frightening crime bosses...

PAST IMPERFECT Patsy looked back over her difficult heritage PAST IMPERFECT: Patsy looked back over her difficult heritage

When people sign up for the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? they expect a few surprises. The unex­pected is surely the greater part of the fun in such undertakings.

When Patsy Kensit agreed to take part in the family history series, she probably thought she had little to fear from embarrassing revelations.

After all, she already knew about her father’s criminal past, his association with the Krays and the spells in prison which had caused him to be absent for so much of her childhood; she was beyond being embarrassed by him.

Patsy also had a racy past of her own: a wild youth, drugs and three husbands, including Liam Gallagher. The couple posed almost naked on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1997 as the symbols of Cool Britannia.

The young actress pictured with her mother learned to pay for her own schooling The young actress pictured with her mother learned to pay for her own schooling

Certainly, she never expected to lunge into such despair that she pulled out of the programme – only to resume it and ultimately make peace with her past. What started out as “a romantic notion to find out about my ancestors” became a traumatic ordeal which kept her awake at night and drove her to seek comfort in junk food.

“I was so depressed that I started binge-eating,” says the actress, 40.

“I stopped washing my hair but I didn’t care. There was a point when I couldn’t sleep. You think it’s going to be this gentle, interesting experience but it becomes personal and real. You are finding out everything on the spot so it’s genuinely intense. I’m a really together person but I was not coping.”

Look back takes courage but it's worth it

What sent her over the edge was not only learning the full extent of her father’s exploits – though there was more there than she thought – but discovering that HIS father, her paternal grandfather, had also been a career criminal.

In fact, Grandpa Kensit had a string of convictions dating back to 1915 for robbery and counterfeiting and had been in prison for the first 10 years of his son’s life.

Patsy recalls: “The crew went off for lunch but my brother Jamie and I went to a pie and mash shop in East London where I ate three double portions. I felt so livid with my grandfather for being absent from my dad’s formative years that I hit rock bottom.

“It made me think: ‘This is a family of total criminals. This is a family that if you go back far enough, we’ll find out that Bill Sikes was a real person and he was a Kensit!’ I genuinely didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want my sons to know.”

She told the programme-makers she could not continue. “I apologised because I’m a professional but I didn’t know how I could get through the next day. I just couldn’t hear any more things about my family.”

Fortunately, a producer convinced her that finding out the whole truth would enable her to find closure. Secrecy has always been the backdrop to Patsy’s life. Her father James was a pickpocket known as Jimmy the Dip who became friends with the Krays after they met as teenagers in an East End boxing club.

Reggie Kray was godfather to Patsy’s older brother Jamie and crops up in family snaps. Kray wrote regularly to Jimmy the Dip from prison and, after Jimmy died, he carried on writing to Patsy. He even advised her to go after the part of Frances, his first wife, in the biopic of the twins’ life, which starred Martin and Gary Kemp (by coincidence, Gary was also Patsy’s first boyfriend). Patsy declined because it would have been hurtful for her mother.

What Patsy didn’t know until now was that her father was also connected with the Richardson gang, who “ran” South London and were rivals of the Krays. “My dad must have been smart on his toes to move between the two,” she says wryly. “It was unusual, to say the least.”

The Richardsons set up fraud schemes, known as “long firms”, which Jimmy was to front. “Early on he did well but he kept getting caught,” says Patsy. “He set up a firm importing Italian stockings and had an Aston Martin, hand-made suits, crocodile shoes and he was making a lot of money.

“These firms could have been legitimate. Why didn’t he just continue with the Italian stockings? But that’s the mind of a villain – and villainy is just as much an addiction as anything.”

Jimmy was 19 when he was first arrested for pickpocketing and was later charged with being “an incorrigible rogue”. As children, she and Jamie believed their father was an antique dealer who had gone abroad on an extended buying trip. In fact, Jimmy had been jailed for fraud. Patsy was 11 at the time.

“The only time I saw my mother Margie cry was when she got the call to say my father was going to prison again,” says Patsy. “I was with her and I saw tears in her eyes.” Margie never took the children with her on prison visits. When they finally worked out the truth for themselves, Margie swore them to secrecy.

For all the money Jimmy amassed, the family lived on a council estate in Houn­slow. Patsy paid for her own private education at a convent school in Twickenham from her earnings as a child model and actress.

She started at four in a TV advert for Birds Eye frozen peas and then appeared in her first film, For The Love Of Ada. Two years later, she played Mia Farrow’s daughter in The Great Gatsby and regularly appeared in children’s TV programmes.

Jimmy came out of prison but died of leukaemia three years later when Patsy was 17. He was, she says, “a broken man; very institutionalised. My brother and I lost a lot of respect for him.” Six years later, her mother died of breast cancer.

While making this film, Patsy discovered that her parents only married a month before Jimmy’s death – as he was already married. She now recognises how her relationship with her charming but often absent father has affected her own relationships with men.

All of her ex-husbands (Dan Donovan of Big Audio Dynamite, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, father of her son James, 15, and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, father of Lennon, eight) have been musicians who left her for long periods to go on tour. By her own admission, she became “a little girl” with them. Only now, at 40 and involved with DJ Jeremy Healy, does she feel she is having her first mature relationship.

Patsy found accounts of the grinding poverty in which her father grew up deeply upsetting. But there was more welcome news waiting for her when she delved further back. Her great-great-grandfather, a parish constable, was so well-respected that when he died his church rang out a muffled peal of bells.

And her great-great-great-great-grandfather James Mayne, curate of St Matthew’s Church in Bethnal Green, East London, during the 1830s, campaigned tirelessly to help the poor of his parish.

He became president of the Association for the Destitute and Poor, to which Prince Albert gave financial support. Rev Mayne was awarded a degree from Lambeth Palace and then moved to a country parish in Buckinghamshire. Patsy’s visit to the church proved to be a cathartic moment.

“He was buried behind the altar so that when his soul rose up, he’d be facing his congregation. When the vicar told me his work [with the poor] was so valuable that they were going to write a book about him, I felt a huge weight coming off my ­shoulders.”

Searching for her past has helped her make sense of her present, she says, and to understand her father. “I’ve been mugged and I’ve been burgled. I know what it’s like to be a victim of crime so I’m really sad about the pain other people were caused. I don’t condone what my dad did but I now understand what made him the man he was. And whatever he did, he’s still my dad.

“Looking back takes courage. It has been really draining but worth it. It makes me realise how lucky I am. I’ve made a new life for my family. I’ve broken the mould.”

* Who Do You Think You Are? starts on August 13, 9pm on BBC1.

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