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Johan Tham, the husband of celebrated actress Jenny Agutter, has died aged 81 following a battle with cancer.
The Swedish property entrepreneur and hotelier, responsible for transforming Grade I listed Cliveden House into one of the most luxurious hotels in Britain, passed away on November 17.
Tham and Agutter, best known for her starring roles in The Railway Children and An American Werewolf In London, married in August 1990, little more than an year after a chance meeting at the Bath Literary Arts Festival.
Their son Jonathan, the couple’s only child, was born that December.
Discussing their marriage with the Daily Mail in 2023, Agutter admitted her husband had no idea who she was when they first met.
She said: ‘One of the things about meeting people and forming relationships as an actor is that others have an idea of who you are before they meet you. That’s hard in any relationship, particularly with men.
‘When Johan and I met I did not feel he had any sense of who I was at all, but he wanted to find out, and that made a big difference. I’m still finding out about him 31 years on.’
Born in Nykoping, Sweden, in 1944, to Vollrath Tham, an international timber importer, and housewife Maja, he would live in his home country until the age of four, when the family – including older sister Christina and twin brothers Sebastian and Peter – relocated to England.
There, he was educated at Heatherdown and boarded at Charterhouse public school before studying law at university – a profession he turned away from upon graduating.
Tham would instead develop a keen interest in property and business, with his early management roles including that of a funeral home and a petrol station.
A devoted family man, he raised two stepchildren and a daughter, Johanna – now a special needs teacher – with first wife Anna Lallerstedt before their divorce in 1989.
In 1978, Tham and business partner John Lewis bought Bath’s historic Royal Crescent, at the time little more than a boarding house, and enlisted architect William Bertram to transform it into a luxury hotel.
But Cliveden House in rural Buckinghamshire would prove to be their most significant project, and with the National Trust keen on restoring a venue that once hosted the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, they set to work.
Cliveden was already steeped in rich history. It was here, in the summer of 1961, that Christine Keeler had been invited by a friend to stay at a cottage on the Cliveden estate.
She went for a swim, emerging naked from the pool before the ‘hungry eyes’ of a government minister, John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, who was staying in the main house as a guest of its then owner Lord Astor.
Keeler went on to have affairs with both Profumo and with a Russian intelligence officer called Yevgeny Ivanov, who had also been in residence.
The furore when this potential breach of security became public led to Profumo’s resignation and later that of prime minister Harold Macmillan.
As managing director of Cliveden, Tham transformed the venue into a high-end hotel, and it was here that he exchanged vows with Agutter.
‘We married in 1990 and our son Jonathan was born later that year,’ Agutter told the Daily Mail in 2018.
‘I was delighted when he arrived so late in my life, but it was a shock to discover that after 37 years of doing my own thing, I had dropped very low on the priority list.
‘It was a sea change and a very healthy one.’
Clivedon was subsequently bought by the billionaire property investor Ian Livingstone in 2012 for £30 million.
