He lives in south London with his wife Shane, their two daughters, Pascale and Mercedes, and son, Rafe. John Sessions, 40, studied English at university in Wales and Canada and then went to Rada. He won a cult following in London in the mid-1980s with his one-man shows, and was a star of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Did John Sessions have a family?

He was born John Gibb Marshall, in January 1953, to Scottish parents in Ayrshire. When he and his twin sister Maggie were three, they moved to Bedfordshire, where his domineering father worked as a gas engineer. His mother Esme was 'a much more tender creature' from whom he inherited a love of reading.

Was John Sessions a smoker?

This period in his life was unhappy. In a "Worst of Times" column for The Independent from around 1990, he talked of how the freezing Canadian weather had depressed him, he was smoking "far too many cigarettes" and "had a couple of disastrous flings", and described his PhD dissertation as "200 pages of rubbish".