How I found love after the devastating death of my wife. In his most soul-baring interview, VINNIE JONES breaks his silence on his new relationship – and the startling change in his life

Vinnie Jones is in love. ‘I never thought this would happen in a million years,’ says the footballer turned Hollywood tough guy, 59, who lost his wife Tanya to cancer five years ago. ‘After that I thought, “I’m done.”’

The former leader of the so-called Crazy Gang of hard-nut players at Wimbledon has appeared in nearly 100 films since his mate Guy Ritchie cast him as a brutal debt collector in Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels in 1998. Now he’s about to play gangster Danny Driscoll in the wonderful musical stage version of Only Fools And Horses. ‘That show was massive when I was growing up,’ he says. ‘I’ve got more of a buzz about this than about anything I’ve done for quite a while.’

He’ll have someone special cheering him on during his three-week Christmas run, which will surely please anyone who saw this self-proclaimed macho man break down in tears during an interview with Piers Morgan the year after Tanya’s death, vowing that he would never marry again.

‘You think and say a lot of things when the tragedy first happens. I don’t think I said I would never have a girlfriend again, but I didn’t think I would at the time,’ Vinnie says now. ‘As time goes on you move centimetres forward. Different things come to life again in your body and your soul and your heart.’

Vinnie Jones is in love. ‘I never thought this would happen in a million years,’ says the footballer turned Hollywood tough guy, 59, who lost his wife Tanya to cancer five years ago

His eyes glisten as he recalls the dark days after Tanya’s death, alone in Los Angeles where he lived at the time, when the pandemic meant social isolation. ‘I was on my own after the funeral, after everybody had gone. Everybody dried up with calls and texts and all that. They had nothing else to say. That’s when it got lonely. It’s so weird. It’s anger, it’s pain, it’s remorse. But also rejoicing. We had a million times more great days than we had bad. It’s a strange thing to get through.’

Vinnie eventually came back to England and bought a farm in West Sussex, returning to his roots as a gamekeeper’s son who had grown up loving hunting, shooting and fishing. Then last year a mutual acquaintance put him in touch with Emma Ford, 47, an English actor and script consultant he’d known vaguely in LA. ‘Her friend who’s my friend said, “Vinnie’s back in England, Emma’s back here too, they only live 20 minutes from each other, why don’t we get a little date going?” So we met.’

They got on so well that he hired her to help with a new series for Discovery+ called Vinnie Jones In The Country, which is filmed on his own land and shows off his deep knowledge of British wildlife. ‘Then it got stronger and stronger,’ he says, talking of their feelings for each other. ‘I’m moving forward quite steadily and relations build, and that’s what has happened with me and Emma.’

So, is marriage on the cards? ‘As you get older you go, “I’d never say never again!”’ Vinnie laughs, a deep, rumbling sound. ‘I ain’t got a crystal ball.’ Then a footballing metaphor comes to mind that suggests he’s reluctant to change anything. ‘If the game’s going well and you’re winning one-nil, don’t make any substitutions. Keep it as it is, keep it cool.’

Vinnie and partner Emma Ford on his show Vinnie Jones In The Country

Tanya developed skin cancer which spread to her brain, and she died in LA in July 2019

Vinnie has never really spoken about this publicly before, but here in the club lounge of a West End hotel he reflects on Emma and Tans, as he calls his late wife. ‘Emma’s life has been very much like mine: left home at 15 and a go-getter, if you don’t work you don’t eat. With Tans, everything was on me.’ How does he mean? ‘Tans was a homemaker, she looked after the family and I took care of everything else. Whereas it’s different with me and Emma. She’s got her track, I’ve got my track, we’ve got our track.’

Are his grown-up children happy with the new relationship? ‘Oh yeah. And Tans would want me happy. One hundred per cent. You can’t live on a big farm on your own, eating kebabs every night. It’s not right.’

He’s a big unit with a battered face and he can’t help but look menacing in his baker boy hat and pea coat, fleece zipped right up to the throat. But, with his 60th birthday coming up in January, he’s showing more of his softer side, and appearing in a West End comedy is very much part of that. ‘I know every one of them characters from real life. I think John Sullivan [the original writer] must have sat in estate pubs like ours and watched as that all went on around him.’

The comedian Paul Whitehouse and John Sullivan’s son Jim turned the tales of Del Boy, Rodney and Grandad into a fast-paced, hilarious and surprisingly touching musical, with music by the late Chas Hodges from Chas & Dave. The show ran in the West End from 2019 to 2023, and has just embarked on a UK tour, returning to London for three weeks at Christmas. ‘I’ve got butterflies in my stomach about doing this,’ says Vinnie, who will sing as Danny but won’t have to dance. ‘We were at the rehearsal space and they did the whole show for me. I didn’t realise how emotional it is. I was choked up a couple of times.

‘Maybe it’s because I’m older, or because of what they’ve done with the story, but it touches me: Marlene and Boycie are trying to have a baby. Del Boy is getting in a panic because Rodney is going. I’ve been through that with my mates,’ he says, remembering how the close-knit gang of Wimbledon players broke up after winning a famous victory over Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup Final. ‘I was filling up when I saw this version of Only Fools. It’s the honesty that overwhelms you and the fact you can relate to it.’

Now he’s about to play gangster Danny Driscoll in the wonderful musical stage version of Only Fools And Horses 

Only Fools brings back memories of childhood for Vinnie, but there was sadness as well as laughter. ‘My first devastation in life was when my mum and dad split up. I was 13. I’m not blaming them, but no one gives the kids any help,’ he says. ‘We never had no counselling. I had a lovely life playing football and running around, going fishing and shooting, then all of sudden someone trod on it with a size 44 boot.’

The rage he felt would carry on into adulthood. ‘I’m not a gangster, I never portrayed myself to be,’ he says. ‘I was a young lad with a lot of testosterone. I tried to join the Army, they wouldn’t have me. So then I joined the Crazy Gang.’

The defining image of his career was a photograph of him squeezing the testicles of Paul Gascoigne during a match in 1988. He also played for Leeds Utd and Chelsea, and captained Wales. He was fined by the FA for making a video celebrating Soccer’s Hard Men, but it caught the eye of Guy Ritchie, who thought Vinnie would be ideal for the role of Big Chris in his cinematic debut. Many movie roles followed, including in Ritchie’s follow-up film Snatch and later X-Men: The Last Stand. ‘I hate talking about money but in 15 years of football I made the same money as in one movie,’ Vinnie says. ‘I was on £300 a week when we won the FA Cup.’

Vinnie and Tanya had dated as teenagers in Watford but drifted apart and did not see each other again until much later, when they both had children by other people – Vinnie a son, Aaron, and Tanya a daughter, Kaley. They married in 1994 and later moved to America. ‘I had to move to Los Angeles,’ says Vinnie. ‘You had to be there to go to meetings for movies in those days, before it was all done on Zoom.’

Despite all his success, the rage kept resurfacing. Vinnie was found guilty of assaulting a neighbour in 1998 and five years later fined for an incident on a plane. ‘The alcohol kept bringing that anger out. I had more lives than a cat. I managed to get through having 68 stitches in my face from a bar fight and being glassed in the face twice and bottled in the back of the head. How the f*** I’m not in prison or in a grave I do not know. I’m grateful every day for that.’

The defining image of his career was a photograph of him squeezing the testicles of Paul Gascoigne during a match in 1988

When did he turn his life around? ‘I was strong enough and brave enough to stop the alcohol, to stop what was causing all the damage, because all it did was got me doing reckless s***. Now I can see trouble coming.’

Vinnie stopped drinking in 2012 and somehow stayed sober through grief. ‘The easiest thing to do would have been to go back on the booze and end up in the nick. All the green eyes [jealous people] would have gone, “Told you he was an idiot. He’s just a Watford thug.” Losing Tanya was traumatic, although we knew one day it would happen. But we were in denial, you know?’

Tanya’s heart had actually failed while she was giving birth to Kaley many years earlier and her life had been saved by an emergency transplant, but the drugs she took to keep her body from rejecting the organ meant her immune system was low.

Tanya developed skin cancer which spread to her brain, and she died in Los Angeles in July 2019. ‘They said she wouldn’t get through the weekend so I flew everybody over as quick as we could: her mum and dad, sister and brother, friends from school, everybody.’

Vinnie tried to beat his grief with bravado, recording The X Factor: Celebrity shortly after Tanya’s death. ‘At the beginning you’re striding out there saying, “I’m dealing with this.” But you’re not looking where you’re going and sooner or later you go over the cliff and crash. That’s what happened with me. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, really.’

People began to realise what he had been going through when he wept while being interviewed on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2020. ‘That’s the most vulnerable I’ve been in my life, because of the trauma,’ he says. ‘At that point nothing else mattered in the world.’

He received lots of messages of support, including a letter and artwork from the notorious violent criminal Charles Bronson, who has changed his name to Salvador. ‘I got a voicemail, he can send them via the lad that goes in and sees him. Powerful. He says, “It’s Salvador here, you’re a good man, don’t you worry about people knocking you boy, you’re a real man.”’ Did he reply? ‘Yeah. Just thanks for the support.’

The interview also changed him. ‘A penny dropped with me. I went, “There are a lot of lads going through this. The best thing I can do is be as honest as I can.” That’s what I intend to do now: show blokes that real men deal with it. You’ve got to talk about it. Every week I have three or four grown men break down and go, “If you can do it I can do it.”’ What can he do for them? ‘Give them the confidence to talk to somebody,’ Vinnie says. ‘You can be the toughest bloke in the world or the softest, you still have to deal with your demons.’

His son lives over here, and has served with the British Army. Kaley, however, stayed in the States and has just got married. ‘I’ve never seen her so happy. She had a couple of ups and downs, but once she met Lauren, she was away.’

After making In The Country, Vinnie got a call from Guy Ritchie, who offered him the part of Geoff the gamekeeper in his recent Netflix series The Gentlemen. ‘Happy days. Absolutely magnificent fit,’ Vinnie says. ‘He said, “I want you to play it nice and quietly, reserved and all that. There’s obviously an undercurrent in Geoff which is going to come out more in the second series.’

He starts filming that in January after Only Fools And Horses, and says, looking back to his role in Lock, Stock when Big Chris the quiet enforcer suddenly erupted with ferocious violence after his son was held at knifepoint, ‘I think that’ll happen with Geoff.’

Off screen, he seems less likely to explode than ever before. ’My life has done a 360-degree turn. I like the quieter life, which is how I started,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit worn out, a bit battered and bruised, I’d say. Make no bones about it, I was a f****** loon. But I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if the past weren’t the past. Let the past be the past and let the future be the future.’

• Vinnie stars in Only Fools And Horses The Musical at London’s Hammersmith Apollo from 17 December-5 January. Tickets: OnlyFoolsOnStage.com.