Alan Lake

Alan Lake
Photo by John Vere Brown, 1964
Born	(1940-11-24)24 November 1940 Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, UK
Died	10 October 1984(1984-10-10) (aged 43) Sunningdale, Berkshire, England, UK
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1964–1984
Spouse(s)	Diana Dors (1968–1984) (her death)
Children	2

Alan Lake (24 November 1940 – 10 October 1984) was an English actor, best known as the third husband of Diana Dors.

Alan Lake was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire on 24 November 1940. He studied acting at RADA, and began to work in television roles in 1964.

He is best known as the third husband of the actress Diana Dors, whom he met on the set of the 1968 television series The Inquisitors. He was initially not keen on Dors, his reaction on finding that he would be working with her "Oh no, not Madame Tits and Lips!", but within days they had fallen in love and were married on 23 November 1968. Their stormy marriage produced a son, Jason David, born in 1969. The pair worked together in the early 1970s, on stage in plays such as Three Months Gone, in which Dors received her best critical reviews since Yield to the Night, and they also received an offer to appear together in a TV sitcom, Queenie's Castle.

In July 1970 Lake was involved in a pub brawl for which he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison later that year (his friend, the musician Leapy Lee, was sentenced to three years for stabbing the pub's relief manager), although he was released after serving a year. Lake was a keen horseman and on his release from prison Dors presented him with a mare named Sapphire. While riding the horse in 1972 he was unseated when the horse ran into the bough of a tree, and broke his back, and for a time it was thought he might spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair; In fact, he recovered and was walking again within three weeks. After leaving hospital, unable to work while he recovered, and in severe pain, he began drinking heavily. Dors said of him at this time: "alcohol had unleashed a monster, uncontrollable and frightening".

Lake began hallucinating and lapsing into psychotic episodes, but was diverted from drinking after becoming a Roman Catholic, also convincing Dors to follow him in adopting the religion. In 1974 Dors was rushed to hospital suffering from meningitis, and Lake was told that she might not survive the night, causing him to faint. In 1975, within months of her illness, Dors became pregnant at the age of 43 with their second child and was advised by doctors to have an abortion, but because of her new-found religion, and regret at two previous abortions, decided to go ahead with the pregnancy; She miscarried, which led Lake to return to heavy drinking.