Oscar-winning actor Sir Michael Caine has backed voluntary euthanasia and told how he asked a doctor to help his terminally ill father to die.
Maurice Micklewhite, a Billingsgate fish market porter, died in hospital at the age of 56 in 1955, after becoming ill with liver cancer.
Repeating comments he made to Sky News in October 2009, Sir Michael told Classic FM about his father's death.
He said: "My father had cancer of the liver and I was in such anguish over the pain he was in that I said to this doctor, I said, 'Isn't there anything else you could... just give him an overdose and end this,' because I wanted him to go.
"He said, 'Oh no, no, no, we couldn't do that.'
"Then, as I was leaving, he said, 'Come back at midnight.' I came back at midnight and my father died at five past 12. So he'd done it."
Sir Michael said his father had been given just three to four days to live when he asked the doctor to perform the mercy killing.
But he kept the request secret from his mother Ellen, a cook and a cleaner, who died in 1989.
Asked if he agreed with voluntary euthanasia, Sir Michael, 77, said: "Oh, I think so, yeah.
"I think, if you're in a state to where life is no longer bearable, if you want to go.
"I'm not saying that anyone else should make the decision, but I made the request, but my father was semi-conscious."
Assisted suicide is an offence under the 1961 Suicide Act.
But earlier this year, director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer issued guidelines which stated that a person was unlikely to face prosecution if they acted out of compassion.
Sir Michael has won two Academy Awards. One in 1986, for Hannah and Her Sister, and the other in 1999, for The Cider House Rules.
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I'd still like the police to have a quiet word there
