Death
After a failed court case against the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation over a copyright case which cost him £250,000 in 1989, Green lived out his life away from the media in solitude, confined to his Baker Street flat and lacking many of the financial riches of his former fame. After a lifetime of smoking a pipe, heavy drinking and latterly taking recreational barbiturates, Green was diagnosed with and died from lung cancer in the Royal Marsden Hospital.
Green's son Christopher postponed his wedding and flew from Canada to be at his dying father's bedside.
The bulk of Hughie Green's estate was bequeathed to his lover at the time of his death, Christina Sharples, widow of Green's friend and Opportunity Knocks musical director Bob Sharples.
His epitaph at Golders Green Crematorium, reads: "You were the star that made opportunity knock. You will never be forgotten. Christina".
Read more about this topic: Hughie Green
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Once one’s up against it, the precise manner of one’s death has obviously small importance.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)