Comedian Spike Milligan had at least two illegitimate children by different women while still married to his second wife, it has been claimed.

The bombshell was reported in a Sunday newspaper more than a year after Spike died in Sussex while his family gathered for the unveiling of a plaque at one of his former homes.

Details of his private life will be made public in a biography due to be published next month.

The book will claim Milligan fathered a daughter, Romany, who works in Canada, and James, who lives in Britain.

Both are in their 20s and reportedly born within a few months of each other while the former Goon was married to wife Paddy.

The book says the comic stood by Margaret Maughan, the mother of James, never denying he was the father and partly paying for his son's education through to university, according to the report.

Milligan is reported to have painted a portrait of Maughan and kept it in his house near Rye.

Father and son met for the first time in 1992 and James, now 26, visited his father in Sussex on a few more occasions, according to the article.

The new book, Spike Milligan: The Biography, written by Humphrey Carpenter and published by Hodder and Stoughton, details the comic's anguish over women, family and work.

Maughan and Roberta Watt, the mother of Romany, are interviewed at length and the book also claims there was a third mistress, Liz Cowley, a television journalist.

Carpenter also claims Milligan never got on with fellow Goons, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine and had his ups and downs with Peter Sellers.

Yesterday Milligan's daughters Sile and Jane, and son Sean - as well as four grandchildren - watched as a Heritage Foundation blue plaque was unveiled by fellow comedian Eric Sykes at the comic's former home in Bayswater, west London.

Later, a charity lunch was held in Milligan's honour at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane.

Chairman of The Heritage Foundation, David Graham, paid tribute to the Goon and called on the BBC to rescreen his "classic" comedy, saying without shows like The Goon Show and his series Q, Monty Python would never have happened.

Milligan, who was given an honorary knighthood for services to entertainment in the 2001 New Year's Honours, died in February last year, aged 83.