ACTOR COMMITTED SUICIDE AFTER SHOW MOVIE
The suicidal-dwarf movie with elaborate sort of time jumps. “One particular studio said, ‘Look, I want to save you a lot of time: you could not come up with a more uncommercial concept. He’d entrusted me with his story and, in effect, I was his suicide note.”īecause of the subject matter, the screenplay wasn’t exactly rushed into production. For some random reason, he just grabbed onto whatever journalist passed by and poured his guts out to me in literally the final week of his life. I started listening back to the tapes and I realized that he knew he was going to do it. “I spontaneously got incredibly emotional. She called to say that Hervé had committed suicide just a few hours before,” said Gervasi. “It was Kathy Self, who was Hervé’s real-life girlfriend.
About a week later-on Sunday, September 4, 1993, at around 5:36 P.M.-the phone in Gervasi’s Clapham flat rang. Gervasi returned to London with 12 hours’ worth of cassette tapes from his time with Villechaize. He was the most original person I think I’d ever met, so I promised him that I would one day tell his story.” He is a tremendously complex, contradictory, brave, crazy, hilarious, wonderful, dangerous person. ‘My god, there’s so much more to him than this punch line of ‘Da plane! Da plane!’. As he was telling me this story, I was thinking. He would wear a poncho and smoke cigarillos-and based his new persona on the Man with No Name, having learned English watching Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and John Wayne on TV. “So he was sent there and became a part of that burgeoning avant-garde sort of Greenwich Village theater culture. “His father said, ‘Go where the freaks go. “His brother, Patrick, told me that would walk down the street and just be kicked in the head for being different.” After a promising start as a painter-he became the youngest artist to have his work shown in the Museum of Paris-Villechaize changed course at his father’s suggestion. “There was an almost medieval intolerance for people who were different at that time,” said Gervasi of Villechaize’s coming-of-age years in 1950s France. He did not grow taller than 3-foot-10 Villechaize was bullied mercilessly. At a young age, Villechaize was subjected to barbaric treatments including having sheep’s marrow injected into his spine. Upon discovering that his son suffered from proportionate dwarfism, he took Hervé to medical clinics in Minnesota, England, and Germany in hopes of curing the condition. Villechaize’s father had been a doctor in Paris. Intrigued, Gervasi ended up meeting the actor three times in a five-day span, and hearing his tragic life story. But Villechaize was not finished talking. Gervasi ran through his questions and collected a few quotes, before packing up his recorder and notebook-eager to get to a more exciting interview on his itinerary. The reporter dutifully flew to Los Angeles, and met Villechaize for what was supposed to be a quick conversation at a West Hollywood restaurant.
Gervasi did not expect much from the interview. And aside from the occasional Geraldo appearance or odd Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, Villechaize’s career had dried up.
ACTOR COMMITTED SUICIDE AFTER SHOW SERIES
But it had been about a decade since Villechaize was fired from his last high-profile job-the TV series Fantasy Island, where he played sidekick Tattoo-after demanding equal pay to his co-star, Ricardo Montalbán. Gervasi was supposed to crank out a 500-word “Where Are They Now?”–style blurb about the French actor, perhaps best known for playing evil henchman Nick Nack in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun. In 1993, Sacha Gervasi was working as a journalist in London when he received what would become the strangest-and most meaningful-assignment of his life: an interview with Hervé Villechaize.
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