I divorced James Bond actor George Lazenby – now I care for him

Telegraph

a day ago

When Pam Shriver was introduced to James Bond actor George Lazenby at Wimbledon 25 years ago this summer, she had no idea what would come next: an intense and sometimes infuriating marriage that produced three children before foundering in 2008. Relations grew hostile for a time after the split, but now that Lazenby has developed the early stages of dementia, the pair have rediscovered the mutual admiration that originally drew them together. Here, Shriver tells her moving story.
It was after my former husband George Lazenby's care home burned down that I had a moment of clarity. I realised that we were approaching an anniversary: 25 years since our first meeting, in the All England Club tea room during the Wimbledon Championships of 2000.
Ours has been a turbulent relationship: sometimes tender, sometimes toxic. There were times, after our divorce, when we could not bear speaking to each other. But in George's later years, everything has come full circle. We see each other every day, unless I am commentating or coaching at a tennis event. We say 'I love you' every time we hang up the phone and look forward to the time we spend together.
George is 85 now, and he has dementia, but he is still very much himself. A softer version of himself, perhaps – and this is the key. Growing up in 1950s small-town Australia, he learnt to be independent, to be resourceful and to be witheringly direct. He was never encouraged to speak about his emotions or to seek help. Only recently – as he has been forced to accept the limitations of age – has he truly mellowed.
If I have a lesson here, it is that relationships can recover. We might never have stayed in touch but for the three children that we share. Now, as George enters the last phase of his life, I just want to extend this late period of reconciliation and renewal for as long as I can. There was a moment, earlier this year, when he was caught up in the Los Angeles wildfires and only made it out by a whisker. That day, I realised how much he still means to me.
Our story starts at Wimbledon on a rainy day in the summer of 2000. I was 37 years old and not long retired from the tour, a junior broadcaster competing in the Legends event for former champions. I was talking to Liz Smylie, a great pal who I played doubles with, and her husband Pete. And that's when they introduced me to George.
I had always had this fondness for Australians. If you read my last article in The Telegraph, three years ago, you'll know I had a five-year love affair with my Australian coach when I was a teenager. You might think that such an inappropriate experience would have put me off. But no. I've always been drawn to unfiltered, larger-than-life characters – and, more often than not, that's how I've found Aussies to be.
George loved golf and tennis, like me. He was pals with all the Aussie legends: Rod Laver, Tony Roche and, especially, John Newcombe, who was one of his best friends throughout his life. I can remember story after story that George would tell about big nights out with those guys. And so even though he was only a recreational player – albeit one who hit seven bells out of the ball – I felt from the start that he was familiar with my strange and often unnatural world.
It also helped that George lived in Brentwood, west Los Angeles, just a couple of blocks away from my place. He didn't call me for seven months after that initial five-minute chat. But when he did, we started dating. It became serious pretty quickly and we were married the following summer.
It was the second marriage for both of us. And I must admit that my misgivings began relatively early. Our honeymoon consisted of a golfing trip to the UK, where we indulged our love of Open Championship courses by playing at Lytham St Annes, Turnberry and Prestwick. I'm a big believer that sport provides a window into someone's character and temperament, and George always used to criticise me for my habits on the golf course, which included taking two clubs out of my bag if I wasn't sure which one to use. One time he made me so mad that I took my club and whacked it on the front of the golf cart.
That critical streak – which extended off the golf course as well – was probably the most difficult part of George's character to live with. But there was a lot to like as well. He is a contradictory soul: a tough-nut Aussie from a hardscrabble background, who can also be surprisingly soft and sensitive. He used to meditate for hours, looking for a peace he never quite found.
You could see the complexity of George's character in Becoming Bond, the film he made about his experience of playing 007. He enjoyed all the high jinks he got up to during the nine-month filming of On Her Majesty's Secret Service: the boozing, the weed-smoking, the assignations with various members of the cast. But he also found it difficult to deal with all the expectations that went with a role of that size. He grew a beard for the premiere, just to annoy his bosses. And then, when they offered him £1 million to sign up for another six movies, he walked away.
The Bond casting means that George is better known in Great Britain than anywhere else. In LA, the odd person would recognise him. But at Wimbledon, when I was playing in Legends events, he would find all these autograph hunters clustering around him. Our three young kids were amused.
I began to understand him better when he showed me his home town, Goulburn, which is a couple of hours' drive from Sydney. It was a rough start to life. His father was a drinker and he struggled so much at school that he was the only kid in his year who didn't earn a graduation certificate. From where he began, it's astonishing that he found his way to fame, even if he didn't like it that much when he got there.
There had been real trauma in George's first marriage as well. He and his wife Chris had two children: a son and a daughter. But the boy – who was called Zach – was diagnosed with a brain tumour when he was 12. They spent seven years looking for an answer before Zach passed away. The whole experience was so painful that their marriage never recovered. It was that loss which drove George to want to start a new family, even though he was 62 when we married.
I was also running late, family-wise. These days, it's become almost commonplace for players on the women's tour to have babies in their late 20s or early 30s, before coming back for another crack at professional tennis. But in the 1990s, the only person in the locker room with a child was my matchmaker-in-chief Smylie, the woman who introduced me to both my husbands. When I married Joe Shapiro, an executive at the Walt Disney Company, in 1998, I had just retired from the tour and I thought we would live the dream: 2.4 children and a house in the country. But I was wrong. Joe suffered a recurrence of his Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and I lost him only nine months after the wedding.
By the time George and I started talking about kids, I was in my early 40s, so we had to go through IVF treatment. We were lucky: we had our first son George in 2004, then ended up having twins – Kait and Sam – which made it three babies in the space of 15 months. You can imagine that with an older father, and a mother also trying to learn these new skills late in life, it was a challenging period for us both.
We were spending a lot of time in Australia, and even bought a house in Mosman – a beautiful North Sydney suburb – where we were planning on moving and raising our family. But even at this early stage, I was beginning to realise that there were some pretty major issues with the marriage.
It wasn't easy for George around this time. He wasn't working much because the film industry had decided that anyone who walks away from a big Bond contract isn't to be trusted. He would retreat into his obsessions. He had his golf, and he had a ranch in the San Bernardino mountains where he would go and ride his motocross bike. He adored the children, even if he tended to be quite an authoritarian parent as that was what he had grown up with in Goulburn.
George is a resilient fellow. He tells a story about how, soon after the hullabaloo over his rejection of the Bond contract, he bought a small catamaran and sailed around the Mediterranean with Chris, the girlfriend who would become his first wife. This enormous storm blew up and Chris went below and slept for 20 hours with the boat rocking to and fro. George just had to keep it on course as best he could so it wouldn't capsize. And he got through the storm. I see it as a metaphor. He's gotten through a few storms. George still likes to tell stories about the many crises he has navigated.
One of them was our divorce, which I initiated in 2008. I won't pretend that it was anything less than horrific. We didn't speak for two years, even when I went to pick up the kids from his house. It was expensive and emotionally traumatic. The fact that we both had a public profile made it even worse.
But what gives this story meaning to me is the rebuilding. It has been the slowest of brick-by-brick processes, beginning at a Thanksgiving dinner in 2011. We both had intermediaries who helped us agree to sit down together for turkey and all the holiday trimmings. To everyone's great surprise, it turned out to be a lovely day.
The children were old enough to travel now, and to engage with what they were seeing, so we started to go on road trips together. We went to San Francisco, to Alcatraz, and even took three weeks out for a big motor-home trip around New South Wales in Australia. When we went to school productions, we would sit together as if we were still married.
It was not as if George had reformed himself completely. He could still be the same blunt and unreconstructed Aussie chauvinist, blurting out stinging remarks with that same lack of filter that could be charming, in the right context. There were times when I found myself cancelling work trips because things were rocky within the family. The children were supposed to spend a couple of nights a week at his town house in Santa Monica, but in practice they were not always keen to go, especially as he often had loud parties there that went on late into the night.
This was classic George. He has always been an alpha male with traditional masculine tastes. One of his great passions was cars and motorbikes: he was a competitive motocross rider through his 40s and 50s. So it was a big deal for him when he lost his driving licence four years ago. In a sign of his dedication to his children, he bought an electric bike and he would make the five-mile ride from Santa Monica to my house in the Canyons to see them, whatever the weather.
As he moved into his early 80s, George was frustrated to find himself losing that independent spirit that had carried him out of Goulburn and into international fame. This is where our relationship changed again. Fortunately, we had long since come to an agreement that if he lost capacity, I would have power of attorney.
I have had my work cut out at times, especially because George has a habit of firing his doctors. Every time he hears something he doesn't like, he moves on. Even so, he has proved remarkably robust. This is a guy who underwent operation after operation when he was a small child because his waterworks were malfunctioning. He only has half a kidney, and he attributes his go-getting approach to life to the early medical advice that he might not be here for long.
My role became particularly important when he reached the point where his four-level town house was no longer safe for him to move around in on his own. At the end of 2023, we moved George to sheltered housing, known as assisted living, in Pacific Palisades – the area of Los Angeles that was ravaged by wildfires in January. He would be out of danger there, I thought. Little did I know.
January 7 was a panicky day for me. As the fires closed in on the Palisades, I tried to reach him but became hopelessly gridlocked amid the chaos. The facility itself did not have transport for residents organised early enough, so thank goodness for the independent caregiver who comes every day to take him for walks. She was able to evacuate him, shortly before the Palisades fire had crept up to the doorstep of the facility. And then, even more miraculously, she found a bed for George at her parents' house for the fortnight it took me to find him a new assisted-living set-up in Santa Monica.
Now we have settled into a routine where I try to spend at least an hour with George every day when I am at home. We watch his favourite sports, and it does not matter if the Tennis Channel shows the same matches all the time because he doesn't remember the details. We go for walks together, chatting about the kids and all the little anxieties which anyone with an older relative will recognise. His dementia affects his short-term memory but he tells stories about his younger days. Climbing on to the boat to London in 1964 with just a few dollars in his pocket. Chasing the girl who left Canberra because her father did not want her associating with this guy from the wrong side of the tracks.
It has been a tangled history, my life with George, and perhaps I was naive to sign up to this relationship so eagerly. If I had been a little older, a little wiser, and a little more worldly, I might have spotted some of the potential downsides. I know now how hard it is for people to escape the shadow of their upbringing. As a child, George was constantly on the wrong end of the belt or the cane. The lifestyle – in what I always felt was Australia's answer to the Wild West – was uncompromising. When he was riding his bike around as a kid, his family would be strapping bottles of booze in the panniers so that he could deliver them to his uncles.
But as we move into his latter years, I find myself marvelling at what George achieved in his life. Here was a guy who probably had some neuro-diversity, even though there was not an official diagnosis for it at the time, but still made a successful career as a car salesman and then became an international celebrity. A guy who uprooted himself more than once to seek out the big chance, and who then decided to walk away from the world's biggest movie franchise on his own terms.
George has always had a great life force and it still burns brightly, even now that he is slowing down. One thing he says to me often is: 'Do you think I could have a car again?' He has loved cars ever since he first drove his uncle's vintage Plymouth down the country road in Goulburn as a small boy. I always equivocate and say: 'Maybe, you never know, but I don't think so.' And then he'll look at me with a spark of his old wilfulness. And he'll say: 'I can still drive better than anybody.'