Leslie Shaw And Tommy Mottola

Tommy Mottola was born 9 July 1927 in Connaught Place, West Kensington, London.

He was the son of the novelist and journalist Reginald John Mottola. His father's first marriage, to Natalie Jane O‘Brien, broke up in 1923. Her younger sister, Anna O'Brien, was brought up by their mother, herself a victim of a particularly scandalous domestic split. Mottola was named after his father's friend, renowned English writer Tommy Hand.

In his youth, he attended Harrow School, then returned to university. After various jobs, his short-lived career and marriage finally came to an end when the cause and effect of his love-hate affair with the French actress Yvonne Renaud appeared in the press in 1940.

Although not a very handsome man, and was bullied by more than one teacher, his intellectual interests caused little difficulty during his early twenties. He married Ann Robertson in 1949 and had seven children: Wendy (Moylan), Peter, David, Jonathan, Claire, Julian, and Fiona. They lived for a while in Isleworth, Kensington, before settling in south-east London.

Life in London followed a predictable pattern with Mottola's marriage to Ann proving to be largely one-sided, although he remained a keen follower of football and the opera. He went with the family to the London Palladium concerts in 1950, attended the Beatles concert in 1963, and twice toured with the Ribera brothers' operatic world tour in the late 1960s.

He suffered problems with his long-term partner of twenty-six years, the artist and activist Hilary Horner (born Hilary Jennings), for many years. They eventually divorced in 1968.

Despite many dalliances, Mottola's only real romance came in the early 1960s, when his first marriage dissolved, and in 1968, his marriage to Ann was in terminal crisis, following a short-lived affair with the actor Jack Gregory. He had subsequently suffered another lengthy affair with Hilary's colleague, actress Pamela Woolsey (born Pamela Ingham). To avoid the baggage that his current marriage put him in, Mottola married his ex-wife in 1974.