Former model and actress Tina Grenville spent years acting in television shows, both here and across the Tasman, but her own personal life could rival any of the dramas she starred in. Tina (72) was the host of Good Morning in the 1980s and a panellist on Selwyn Toogood’s Beauty and the Beast.
Tina has just released her explosive autobiography – A Life in Three Acts – which details scandals involving her first husband’s mysterious disappearance off a Wellington wharf when she was just 19, her thrilling love life and why she couldn’t name the fathers of her two daughters.
Tina had legally separated from her bohemian first husband Ronald Grenville when he went missing in 1958 at the age of 20. She was living alone with their baby Ashley (now 53) when it’s believed Ronald took a bet at a party that he could swim across from Wellington to Eastbourne in the icy sea.
“He rang me the night before the party and the next day he wasn’t there,” she reveals from her home in Piha on Auckland’s West Coast. It was shortly after Ronald’s death that Tina met the great love of her life – artist John Crawley. Sadly, a factor in their separation 10 years later was that she thought she was unable to have children with him.
Tina had arranged to have her contraceptive ring removed so she could try for babies, but much later, it was discovered the doctor – who bizarrely worked in Auckland’s Shortland Street – had replaced the ring instead of removing it. By this time it was 1971 and Tina was in Australia and starring in the hit TV drama The Godfathers.
She had also started dating another man, the show’s producer Robert Bruning. But when John requested to see Tina one last time, the couple ended up conceiving her daughter Lucie, who’s now 40. “It was terrible timing, because not long after her birth John was transferred to Hong Kong but the children and I couldn’t join him due to my long-running contract with the show,” explains Tina, who ended up marrying Robert two years later. He promised to bring Lucie up as his own.
“Robert said, ‘I want you to swear to me when we marry that you will not tell Lucie of her true paternity, and I will swear to you that I will always be responsible for her financially.’ Well, of course, he wasn’t. And that’s when I was finally forced to tell her the truth about John. She took it well, because she was never really close to Robert.”
But it seems history was destined to repeat itself, and after Tina and Robert separated they had one last attempt at trying to make their marriage work. That resulted in the conception of Tina’s second daughter, Sophie (now 34).
Again, Tina writes about being forced to cover up the identity of Sophie’s biological father. “Something happened which I’m not going to say – I just hint at it in the book – and it was so shocking that it was the end of the reconciliation. “Soon after I was pregnant but I didn’t want to associate that terrible night with a baby,” says Tina. “I couldn’t admit for years that Robert was her father but in the end I loved her so much it didn’t matter about the circumstances of her conception.”
Tina returned to Wellington in 1980 to star in a play and later went to Auckland and launched Good Morning for Northern Television while bringing up her girls alone. For the next 15 years, Tina was a single mother – apart from three live-in relationships that didn’t last long. “Eighteen months was the magic cut-off point. And it was tough for them, having a ready-made family, and my mother was living with us too. It was a big ask for anybody.”
Tina’s love life sounds more exciting than most, but Tina is inclined to dwell on the difficulties she faced. “I don’t remember much of the excitement but more the huge struggle of trying to give my girls the sort of upbringing I had. I was in and out of work and there was a lot of anxiety over money.”
Looking back, Tina thinks she should have stayed with John Crawley – her first true love and Lucie’s father. “But if I had, I’ve never have had Sophie.” John Crawley is now 82 and living in Australia. Incredibly he and his wife moved into the same Sydney street, across the road from where Tina had been living, just one week after she moved back to New Zealand.
“I couldn’t believe it. It was very unsettling,” she says. By the time Tina was in her sixties, she never expected to find love again, but fate had other plans in store for her. Now she’s married a third time, to American Tom Cagwin. She’s still beautiful at 72, but Tina has never been confident about her looks.
“Men were always trying to bring me down so I wouldn’t get conceited. So I never felt beautiful at all because all I could see were my faults.”
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