Delvene Delaney on love and life with beloved husband John Cornell
Delvene Delaney opens up on life with her beloved John Cornell, from their Paul Hogan Show days to his battle with Parkinson’s.
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“Inside he’s the same old Corny — he just can’t articulate it as well.”
They married beneath a 100-year-old pear tree on the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1978, promising to love each other for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Forty-two years later the remarkable love story of John Cornell and Delvene Delaney continues, the couple’s vows meaning more than ever as Cornell, now 79, battles Parkinson’s disease.
Or as Cornell’s long time best mate Paul Hogan — who played cupid to the couple all those years ago — puts it: “Corny and Dellie are rock solid, always have been.”
“Delvene has been there through thick and thin with John,” Hogan says from his home in Los Angeles.
“Well it’s got very thin, and she’s still there, by his side, as always.
“We keep in touch a lot, she constantly lets me know what’s going on — some days John can’t really talk on the phone, so she’s like the conduit from him to me, and me to him, and he knows I’m there for him, always.”
For her part Delaney, 69, who fell in love with Cornell when she appeared on The Paul Hogan Show during the 1970s, caring for the man who managed Hogan’s career for decades, and co-wrote and produced Crocodile Dundee is “easy”.
“I don’t mean there haven’t been difficult moments, but John is probably the bravest man I know,” Delaney says.
“He never complains, he never asks ‘why me?’, and he’s always trying to make sure other people are all right.”
Delaney says that, after Cornell initially gained much of his mobility back after undergoing a procedure known as “deep brain stimulation” performed at a Brisbane hospital in 2010, the challenge for the much loved businessman and entertainment producer these days is “communication”.
“John can still speak, but it’s not easy for him to communicate the way he once did.
“So, I think sometimes people might be reluctant to call, because they don’t want to appear rude or impatient with him if they can’t understand what he is saying.
“It’s not a lack of willingness to talk to him, I know that, it’s more an awkwardness of how to deal with it, they don’t want to keep saying “pardon me, pardon me.”
As for Delaney, she says she understands Cornell “perfectly” — but then again, she always has.
Theirs is a love story for the ages, with Hogan recently telling the podcast Evenin’ Viewers that the moment he met Delaney, he knew she was just the girl for his best mate.
“I remember saying to Corny “I’ve just found a winner for you, son.
“I’d met Dellie and she was funny and smart and easy going and I thought ‘I can see Corny falling in love with this lady’.
“And he did, and she did, and they still are — so there you go, I was better at matchmaking for them than I am for myself,” Hogan chuckles.
Cornell and Delaney have two daughters. One of the reasons for the couple’s personal success is that they have always eschewed a showbiz lifestyle.
Even at the height of their fame, when Delaney was a regular on the Hogan Show, as was Cornell, playing Hoges’s gormless offsider Strop, they avoided the limelight. Their 1978 wedding took place, Delaney laughs, “in a paddock, which is very us”.
“We married on my sister’s property, in secret, with just 11 guests,” Delaney — who made her own wedding dress — reveals.
“It was a beautiful place, but my sister and her husband were very self-sufficient and were trying to live a simpler lifestyle, so it had no electricity, no running water, and we spent our wedding night in a tent” she giggles (and Delaney, it must be said, still has one of the most infectious giggles in the business).
She giggles harder when explaining why they had to retake all their wedding photos the day after the nuptials.
“Well, we’d bought this new whiz bang camera for the wedding, but because it was so dark, and there was no electricity, we couldn’t read the instructions on how to take the photos.
“So we had to wait for the sun to come up, the next day so we could read them and take them all again — I got changed in the caravan park across the road.”
Professionally, the partnership has also been a successful one also, with Cornell still actively involved in their various business interests.
“He has good days and bad days,” Delaney says.
“There are days when he sleeps all day, and there are many days where he’s still very much engaged with our hotel (The Hotel Brunswick near Byron Bay, which the couple has owned for 35 years) and at the moment we are putting the finishing touches to a three bedroom penthouse apartment and he’s there all the time.
“He can’t keep away from the place,” Delaney laughs with the exact same, tinkling bell tones that Rosie the Barmaid, one of her Hogan Show alter-egos, charmed a nation — and her partner of 44 years — with.
Cornell, Hogan says, fell hard for Delaney, just as she now says she fell hard for him.
“We lived together for three years before he proposed at a restaurant where we had ordered quail.
“John asked me to marry him, so I saved the wishbone, we broke it in half, and then I had both halves dipped in copper, then silver, then gold, because gold doesn’t adhere to bone, and then I put them on matching necklaces.”
Delaney and Cornell still wear the necklaces all these years later — still bound together, and still making wishes.
NO BORING BITS …
+ Join Delvene, Hoges and other celebrity friends at new podcast Evenin’ Viewers With Paul Hogan, hosted by Frances Whiting, wherever you get your podcasts.
+ Read about Delvene and John’s relationship with Paul Hogan in Hoges’ The Tap-Dancing Knife Thrower: My Life Without The Boring Bits, published by HarperCollins Australia, out on October 29.
Pre-order your copy at Booktopia — enter code HOGAN at checkout for a 30 per cent discount off the RRP of $45.00.
Originally published as Delvene Delaney on love and life with beloved husband John Cornell