Jeremy Brett - Private Life and Health Issues

Private Life and Health Issues

Brett was bisexual, but intensely private. On 24 May 1958 he married the actress Anna Massey (daughter of Raymond Massey). Their son, David Huggins, born in 1959, is a British cartoonist, illustrator and novelist. Brett and Massey divorced on 22 November 1962 after she claimed he left her for a man. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Brett was in a romantic relationship with the actor Gary Bond. In the late 1970s, he was involved with actor Paul Shenar. In 1976, Brett married Joan Sullivan Wilson, who died of cancer in July 1985.

In the latter part of 1986, Brett exhibited wide mood swings that alarmed his family and friends, who persuaded him to seek diagnosis and treatment of manic depression. Brett was given lithium tablets to fight his manic depression. He knew that he would never be cured; he had to live with his condition, look for the signs of his disorder and then deal with it. He wanted to return to work, to play Holmes again.

The first episode to be produced after his discharge was a two-hour adaptation of The Sign of the Four in 1987. From then on the difference in Brett's appearance and behaviour slowly became more noticeable as the series developed. One of the side effects of the lithium tablets was fluid retention; he was putting on weight and retaining water. The drugs were also slowing him down. According to Edward Hardwicke, Brett smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day, which "didn't help his health." He also had heart troubles. His heart was twice the normal size; he would have difficulties breathing and would need an oxygen mask on the set. "But, darlings, the show must go on", was his only comment.

During the last decade of his life, Brett was treated in hospital several times for his mental illness, and his health and appearance visibly deteriorated by the time he completed the later episodes of the Sherlock Holmes series. During his last years, he discussed the illness candidly, encouraging people to recognise its symptoms and seek help.

Read more about this topic:  Jeremy Brett

Famous quotes containing the words private life, private, life, health and/or issues:

    When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all the other qualities. It is the nec plus ultra of the intelligence. Through this alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties.
    Isidore Ducasse, Comte de LautrĂ©amont (1846–1870)

    How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.
    Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)