The Jeremy Brett - Linda Pritchard Story: On the Wings of Paradise

Review: Telling her story has clearly been a therapeutic act for Linda Pritchard, and it helps the countless many who liked and admired Jeremy Brett to understand what his last years were like. Ms Pritchard, perhaps on the advice of her co-author Mary Ann Warner, has cast her narrative in the third person, which makes the story somehow less personal, even slightly less real, for the reader. Perhaps it’s as well. It avoids the situation of a memoir so intimate that reading it feels like the act of a voyeur.

We know that Jeremy Brett struggled with the demon of manic-depression, and that mistaken treatment fuelled the cardiomyopathy that eventually killed him. Linda Pritchard gives us perhaps the only first-hand account we shall have of that struggle, and of her own struggle to understand and to help him.

Nearly ten years ago, she approached him for help in raising sponsorship for a 5000-mile run in aid of cancer research. His generous response was to have unexpected results: without her patient support, he might never have achieved the tranquil resignation of his last couple of years. No-one interested in the actor who was the great Holmes of our time can fail to gain from it.

This well illustrated 146-page hardback can be had from the publisher. Cheques should be payable to R.D. Smith. £1.00 from the sale of each copy will be donated to the Jeremy Brett Memorial Fund for Imperial Cancer Research.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 182, 1998]