Children were more important than acting, says Jenny Shah

When former newspaper kingpin Eddy Shah was tried for rape two years ago, his life was ruthlessly laid bare, every sordid detail splattered across the tabloids.

But in the courtroom, all eyes turned from the accused to the diminutive yet fiercely protective woman observing the proceedings from the confines of her wheelchair.

Indomitable and staunchly dignified as she endured the onslaught of fresh accusations levelled at her husband each day, Jennifer Shah kept the press riveted.

“I wanted to be there,” declares the 72-year-old.

“I had this argument with his barrister. He said he didn’t want me in court. So often wives hear all these things and fall to pieces. It was awful, but I knew it was going to be. I went every day for 11 weeks. It was us against them and it made us stronger.”

Eddy, born Selim, Shah was eventually cleared of six counts of rape against an underage girl in the 1990s.

“Regretfully, this girl went to the police and said that Shah had groomed her from a young age. He had been involved with her mother who was a prostitute during our marriage, which I knew. Had the police done their homework it would never had gone to court.”

Degrading and unduly taxing, the trial heralded a painful return to the spotlight for the former actress who had walked away from a film and television career to raise a family 40 years previously.

A promising student, Jennifer freely admits she had no special inclination towards acting but was simply sent to performance school because “it was on our doorstep” in Hertfordshire. “I wish I could say I was always putting on shows as a child and entertained everybody but I didn’t. Life is odd – you fall into things for no obvious reason,” she muses.

The striking beauty drew notice from casting directors and at 16 was offered her first hosting role on Crackerjack alongside a very young Ronnie Corbett while still in arts school.

She pursued modelling alongside auditioning for television and movie parts.

At 25, she got her first part with Granada in Manchester.

The following year, she was handpicked to play a sultry Bond girl in a Hollywood adaptation of Casino Royale produced by Charles Feldman.

Three studios, it soon turned out, were working simultaneously on three different Casino Royale scripts with three sets of actors and as many directors.

Eventually in 1967 all three opuses were edited into one rather jumbled hotchpotch. The movie was “of its time”, laughs Jennifer. This nonetheless proved one of the most memorable moments of her career. On set she rubbed elbows with the likes of Peter Sellers and starred opposite Woody Allen, who was cast as 007’s nephew.

”I was awfully lucky,” she affirms modestly. “They were just having auditions and I got it. Woody Allen was great fun. He was just so nice and I really admired him. He would say ‘come and sit, relax in the trailer’. I played a Bond girl and about three different roles. I ended up on the front cover of the DVD. I don’t know why – I wasn’t the star.”

Back filming for Granada, she ran into the taciturn floor manager who would become the love of her life, Eddy Shah.

His blunt courtship has become storied in their circle.

“Shah (Jennifer’s affectionate pet name for Eddy) was very anti-social in the early days,” she points out roguishly. “He was always on set, in a corner. We would just say hi to each other. One year I went to the Baftas and he was covering it for Granada – he was the link of the floor, cueing people in. He tells this wonderful story now about seeing me coming down the escalator and thinking I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He came to my table later – I was there with someone else – and said I will see you later at your place. My boyfriend dropped me home and Shah was there waiting for me. He helped me out of the car, we went upstairs and we’ve been together ever since.”

They married in 1970. Jennifer gave up modelling and acting to devote herself to her first born, Martyn – a life in the shadows she relished.

“I never missed acting,” she says.

“I felt children were more important. I was never pushy enough anyway. I couldn’t be bothered to go to parties, meet people and network or the one-on-one with producers in the studio to just ‘talk’.”

She had two more children, Tamsyn and Alex. In the early days of their marriage, Shah announced his plans to quit his job and start his own newspaper, the Sale and Altrincham Messenger.

Unfazed Jennifer agreed and they sold their house to finance the venture.

Times were hard and Shah devoted every waking hour to the paper, juggling reporting, selling and delivering copies.

“I was either very understanding of me or stupid,” she admits with a smile. “But in hindsight it was a good decision.”

The newspaper became the first of a portfolio of 60. In the early 1980s he famously stood up to trade unions refusing to compel his staff to unionise.

Mass picketing of his offices and print works followed, leading to violent clashes. A coffin was once delivered to their home during a relentless intimidation campaign, Jennifer recalls. But the unions eventually backed down. Eddy went on to launch Today in 1986, the first colour national newspaper using the latest available technology.

As Shah fought the unions, 39-year-old Jennifer was waging a war of her own against terminal cervical cancer. Given a mere three months to live, she was placed on a trial for experimental radiotherapy. Miraculously, she survived.

When Eddy sold the Messenger group they moved to America before returning to the UK where they bought and ran a string of golf clubs. In 2002, they took over the Wiltshire Golf and Country Club near Royal Wootton Bassett.

Unfortunately, the weeks of aggressive radiotherapy two decades earlier finally caught up with her 12 years ago. The pioneering treatment, it emerged, had caused her lower spine to collapse, damaging the surrounding nerves. In 2010, she became wheelchair-bound.

“It’s the hardest thing, to accept you have to go in a wheelchair,” she admits. “It changes everything. But you have to bite the bullet. Somebody said to me once, ‘The hospital gave you treatment that in the end put you in wheelchair, are you going to sue them?’ I couldn’t believe his woman would say that. I said ‘For God’s sake they kept me alive.”

The couple had sold the Wiltshire Golf Club and embarked on the construction of a large retirement village on the land when Eddy’s trial brought their lives to a screeching halt.

Earlier this year, they picked up the ambitious scheme, a new 21st century take on retirement homes, with flexible, spacious properties, designed to accommodate a new generation of ‘young’ pensioners - something Jennifer is passionate about.

An indefatigable campaigner, over the past five years she has also raised £1m towards medical research for the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation.

“I know I'll probably never walk again, but it's important to give other younger people hope because the one thing I miss in life is the ability to just walk and enjoy it.”

But dwelling on what was or could have been is out of the question.

She remains firm in her determination to look to the future – a future with the man who once braved picket lines to sit by her bedside in hospital and buoyed her up when she learnt she could never walk again.

“We’ve been through a lot together. If we go anywhere, he will always stay near me. He doesn’t want me to be left alone because I can’t move around,” beams Jennifer who lives in Kington Langley, on the outskirts of Chippenham, with Eddy, 70, and their three dogs.

“You can always look at the past and think, ‘This happened and that was stupid.’ But there have been so many highlights. If you don’t do things in life, if you don’t try, you just don’t know what you’ll miss.”