Breakdown made me stronger:Eccleston

There’s an honesty and candour about this striking, charismatic former Doctor Who, an inner calm and not a whiff of defensiveness as he explains why he’s made his traumas public knowledge in his autobiography and homage to his father, I Love The Bones Of You.

Today the actor looks fit and well as he tucks into a healthy-looking Japanese salad of raw fish, edamame beans and seaweed.

Yet to understand the person, you need to understand where he came from and the influence his parents, Ronnie and Elsie, have had on him. The book particularly examines his relationship with his late father, whose life often mirrored and defined his own highs and lows.

Ronnie had a darker side. Bright but unfulfilled and frustrated, from a generation of men who suppressed emotion, his inner rage would bubble to the surface when he got home, mood swings ever threatening.

Other traumatic trajectories followed. Father and son both had breakdowns, aged 52. After punching a disrespectful co-worker, Ronnie was given time off, put on tablets and some time later was made redundant and never recovered mentally; Christopher was in the throes of divorce, traumatised over leaving his young children, suicidal but lucid enough to admit himself into a psychiatric hospital.

Albert, now seven, and six-year-old Esme, were the catalyst for his recovery, he recalls, after his consultant told him gently of the legacy he would create for his children, were he to end it all.

“He wasn’t severe about it. The legacy would have been, ‘Daddy didn’t love us enough to hang around’. I thought it was beautiful morally and practically for him to say that to me. Children can help you see your worth. They gave me a perspective.”

Eccleston’s father died in 2012. In latter years, there was a rare lucid moment when he told his son, ‘I love the bones of you’, hence the title of the book. “My father loved me. When he said, ‘I love the bones of you’, he was saying his goodbyes.”