Martin Clunes reveals he built a coffin for his Jack Russell while it was still alive after his beloved pet was diagnosed with liver cancer

Martin Clunes built a coffin for his beloved Jack Russell after the pooch was diagnosed with liver cancer. 

The Men Behaving Badly and Doc Martin star, 62, filled the casket with tiny squeaky tennis balls for his ‘buddy' Jim. 

Clunes said he immediately began to construct the coffin after the vet gave the cancer diagnosis as it felt like he was honouring what his mutt had given him. 

Jim died aged 14 in March this year with the actor heart-breakingly saying: ‘Jim was my right-hand man. We'd been through so much together.'

Clunes wrote movingly about his close bond with the Jack Russell in his new book Meetings with Remarkable Animals.

In it, he recalls how the pooch's death unlocked other griefs as ‘we give ourselves an allowance there. Dogs hit people in the heart'.

Jim would adoringly follow Clunes around his sprawling 35-acre smallholding  outside Beaminster, in Dorset, Kent, and sit on his lap as he rode around in a tractor, reported The Sunday Times. 

The actor would take him out in the middle of the night to go lambing, as he said: ‘I think it's a Jack Russell thing, they latch on to one personality. He loves the whole family, but he was my buddy.'

When Jim was given his cancer diagnosis a vet urged Clunes not ‘leave it too late' before putting him down.   

‘The minute he said that, I built his coffin,' Clunes wrote. ‘It's something I can do. It feels like honouring what he's given me.' 

Clunes grew up in Wimbledon Common, south west London, but aged just eight his father, Alec Clunes, died from lung cancer at the age 57. 

He previously told of how he was ‘bundled' off to boarding school following his father's death. 

Clunes told Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 2011 it was ‘agony' being a weekly boarder and he would cry on his way to school. 

He revealed that he was chronic bedwetter, adding: ‘In the end, I went to see a child psychiatrist who got me off it, eventually. In my early teens I stopped.' 

In 2014 he told The Guardian of how his love for his animals first came about when, at his next school, he was put in charge of the school menagerie – feeding, letting out, shutting up the animals – including the sheep. 

‘I loved it. There's something wonderful about the characters of animals, and I now have a family of them around me,' he said.

Clunes openly writes in his new book about the heartbreak of losing a pet and that he has ‘probably wept more for the pets who are no longer with us than I have for some humans'.   

Two weeks after Jim's death, Clunes and his family were hit by further heartbreak when their Jackahuahua, Penny, died of a brain tumour behind the eye. 

Clunes, who lives with his producer wife Philippa Braithwaite and the couple's daughter, Emily, has since adopted two new ‘tiny little Jims' – five month old Jack Russells called Murray and John. 

He took Murray last month to visit a hospice where Clunes is a patron which he said ‘really helped' the patients.         

‘You can have a long chat about a dog they used to have. The family want the photographs and the patients generally like to stroke the dog.' he said.

He recalled how one dying woman loved the feeling of his dog falling asleep on her bed. ‘That warmth and that weight, the weight of a dog on your bed is lovely,' Clunes said.