Rivals actor Danny Dyer says the death of his mentor and champion, Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, caused him to suffer a “spiral of madness.”
Dyer, a longtime familiar face on British TV and film and freshly appreciated for his role in Disney’s Rivals, told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio show that he hadn’t spoken to Pinter in a while when he learnt of his death from a newspaper:
“I did go off the rails for many years and I found out by looking on the front of a newspaper.
“I’d been on a bender and I was coming home and I was going, I think I was going to buy cigarettes at the petrol garage, and I see it in the paper: ‘Pinter dead’.
“This really sent me on a spiral of madness, really. The guilt of not being around him any more and just being lost, I was a bit of a lost soul, and again, angry at the world.”
Dyer added that Pinter had been one of his greatest supporters when he was starting out on his acting career. Dyer even stayed at the older man’s home when performing in one of his plays, Celebration, in 2000, and had proved a support when Dyer suffered stagefright and forgot his lines.
Dyer said of Pinter: “He put his arm around me, and made me feel better about it.”
In April, Deadline reported that Dyer was developing an idea for a play about his relationship with Pinter, whom he referred to as his “mentor.”
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