Rove McManus has shared a heartfelt tribute to his late wife, Belinda Emmett, to mark 20 years since her death.

In a touching post shared overnight, the comedian and TV personality shared a throwback video of the actress on Instagram as he remembered her two decades on from when she sadly died of cancer, aged just 32.

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“20 years ago today a light went out. Remembering Belinda Emmett 12/4/1974 – 11/11/2006,” the 52-year-old captioned the footage of the beloved Home And Away actress.

In the moment captured on his then-chat show Rove Live, McManus gave Emmett the green light to talk about his atrocious outfit on their first date back in 1999, one year after she was first diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Do you seriously want me to do that?” she asked him before spilling details of their first date. “This is the first time we’d actually been out and we met at a function, so Rove was all dressed in his nice suit and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s a bit of a style master.’”

“Anyway, he rocks up to the door [on the first date] and I opened the door and he had this T-shirt on with these jeans and his T-shirt tucked into his jeans, but he had them pulled up so damn high,” she recalled.

“I was just like, ‘Oh no, I really liked this guy. I reckon I can work with it, we can work around it, so it’s OK. He’s got potential, you’ve got to just work around it.’”

They indeed made it work and became one of Australia’s most loved couples at the time. After five years of dating, they announced their engagement in 2004 and were married the following year in an intimate ceremony at Mary Immaculate Church in Sydney’s Waverley.

Sadly, after just one year of marriage, Emmett would loss her eight-year battle with cancer.

In the years after her death, McManus – who was arguably Australia’s most famous TV host at the time – admitted it was hard to go from the funny man on TV to the guy whose wife had just died.

“At the time, it was difficult because you’re trying to juggle what you’re dealing with in life with what you’re dealing with at work. And again, having to do promotion which is part of the job as people want to know what you’re doing,” he said on The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show podcast 2023.

“But then people want to know what’s happening at home. It’s none of your business what’s happening at home. I’m not here to talk about what’s happening at home. If you want to know, you need to be a friend of mine. But if you’re a stranger on the street, you’ll get, ‘Fine, it’s good.’”

McManus is now married to actress Tasma Walton, who in an unexpected twist was the one who introduced him to Emmett at the opening of Sydney’s Fox Studios in 1999.

“We were all at a Fox Studios opening and I had obviously worked with Rove on his show and worked with Belinda, [and I] thought they would be an interesting couple and introduced them,” Walton later told New Idea magazine in 2015.

Walton, 53, revealed she was the one who proposed to McManus in 2009 after he arrived home from an overseas trip.

“I’d done this little painting that said ‘Marry me?’ on it and he said, ‘You’ve got to ask me properly’ and I was like ‘I can’t, I can’t, just marry me would ya!” she shared on Show + Tell’s Monty Diamond in 2014. “It was really, really unromantic.”

McManus and Walton share one child, daughter Ruby, who was born in 2013.