Welsh superstar Sir Tom Jones celebrated his 84th birthday this week, without the love of his life. The singer lost his beloved 'Lady Linda' to lung cancer back in 2015. And while his appetite for affairs during their marriage is well documented, he never considered leaving his first love.
"I still love my wife," he told the Telegraph in 2012 . "The longer you're married, it changes. It's no longer a sex thing.
There's got to be more than that for it to last. We both came from a working-class background, we both came from the same place, so we're not like two foreign people having to explain to the other what their childhood was like. We grew up together.
To walk away from that would be terrible." Here, we look at Sir Tom's complicated love life over the years, including the devastating moment his late wife found out about his infidelity..
. Despite his womanising ways Sir Tom always maintained his wife of 59 years was 'the love of my life', saying he had 'never had that feeling for anyone else, I don't think you can fall in love more than once'. Linda died from lung cancer in 2016, aged 75, a time the singer described as the 'lowest part of my life'.
The couple met when they were 12, the year the Sexbomb singer was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent two years recuperating in his bed. Linda, Tom revealed in his 2015 autobiography Over the Top and Back, would smile at him as she walked to school in Treforest, South Glamorgan, and when he turned 15 she agreed to go on a date..