This month marks the 50th anniversary of the sad death of the actor Dennis Price, star of the classic 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, regarded by many to be the greatest British film of all time. Price was only 58 when he died from cirrhosis of the liver and complications following a broken hip, in a public ward of Guernsey’s main hospital. In the same way his co-star Alec Guinness stole the limelight in Kind Hearts, so the shock break-out of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war did the same on the day of his death.
His debts caused him to ‘beat a strategic retreat’ to the Channel Islands where the booze was cheap and the taxman couldn’t bother him
Price’s demise may not have been front-page news in 1973 but the sense of loss of all who knew him was great. Patrick Macnee described him as ‘one of the sweetest men who ever lived’. Dicky Attenborough called him ‘a gracious man with a total absence of pretensions’. Price was the actor that literally no one had a bad word for.
My fascination with him dates back to the late Sixties and a family holiday in Guernsey. We were in the restaurant at the Hermitage Hotel in St Peter Port and Dennis Price appeared. He greeted us in a friendly way as he did with everyone. He did appear as if he’d had a few drinks but could not have been more affable as he chatted to us. The man, my father told us was a ‘very famous actor’, and after our encounter he became our favourite very famous actor.
At that time, Dennis was well into an alcohol-fuelled decline. A few years earlier the one-time brightest star in the British film industry had been declared bankrupt – he owed the Inland Revenue £10,000, and admitted at the hearing, with his characteristic wit, spending £17,000 on ‘extravagant living and the most inadequate gambling’.
His debts caused him to ‘beat a strategic retreat’ to the Channel Islands where the booze was cheap and the taxman couldn’t bother him. Living on the tiny, car-free island of Sark would have been quite a contrast to the life he had been accustomed to.
Indeed, just after the second world war, Price, contracted on £25,000-a-year, looked to have the world at his feet. He had family connections (he was descended from Cornish nobility, the Prices of Trengwainton), a public school and Oxford education, Byronic good looks, a lovely wife, two young daughters, a red Packard car, a luxurious house in Chelsea and a charming, self-effacing personality which made him a much sought-after dinner party guest. Then it all went horribly wrong.
It’s Price – as the lead and narrator Louis Mazzini, easily the most urbane, articulate and impeccably-mannered serial killer in cinema history – who drives Kind Hearts and Coronets forward. Yet it was Alec Guinness, for his portrayal of the eight members of the D’Ascoyne family, seven of whom Price slays in order to become the 10th Duke of Chalfont, who received the bigger plaudits, with one critic even saying that Guinness had ‘outclassed’ his co-star in the acting stakes. That must have hurt, but worse was to follow. Price’s marriage, showcased in the film annuals of the day, ended in a costly and traumatic divorce, with his wife, the actress Joan Schofield, petitioning on grounds of adultery.
After the box-office flops of The Bad Lord Byron and The Dancing Years, the romantic leads began to dry up and Price’s career went into reverse gear. Nadir was reached in April 1954 when the depressed and demoralised actor was dragged unconscious from the basement kitchen of his lodgings in Kensington having tried to gas himself to death. That failed suicide attempt, did lead to an upturn in his professional fortunes and he settled into a new phase of his career as a dependable character actor.
In whichever role he appeared, Price was always memorable. He was superb as the doctor in the 1965 remake of Ten Little Indians, the most thrilling film version of the Agatha Christie classic. He also had a good role in the highly amusing 1967 sci-fi comedy Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon, in which he played the amiable aristocratic inventor the Duke of Barset. There’s a great scene in the film in which he plays snooker with his cousin, Captain Sir Harry Washington-Smythe, played by Terry-Thomas, who is of course, cheating.
On television at this time, Price was starring in the BBC’s World of Wooster; P.G. Wodehouse regarded him as the best Jeeves he’d ever seen. In 2003, I interviewed Ian Carmichael, who had played Bertie Wooster in the series and he told me how he and Price had once gone to the pub after rehearsals. Price was morose and when Carmichael asked him what was the matter, Price told him he had had to pawn his father’s watch. Carmichael believed Price may have been blackmailed, but although there were always strong rumours that he was bisexual – which would have potentially made him a blackmailer’s target – a 2018 biography, The Price of Fame, unearthed no evidence to back that up.
Yet there are still unanswered questions. What exactly was the attraction that Price’s rather strange manager and ‘friend’ Marcus Wootton held for him? Everyone loved Dennis, but they generally couldn’t stand Wootton.
Price spent the last months of his life in Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Guernsey. Taken there after an all-day drinking session in July 1973, he may still have got out alive had he not slipped over and broken his hip. One can only wonder what was going through his mind on those final days. His visitors included his old master from Radley and fans who had drunk with him while on holiday. London train driver Peter Green was one of the last to see him, the week before he died. ‘Don’t worry, dear boys, I’ll soon be back in action,’ was Dennis’s cheery farewell.
But sad though the story is, there is a happy ending, of sorts. Price is enjoying quite a revival, largely due to the splendid nostalgia channel Talking Pictures TV, which shows his films on a regular basis. There’s a Dennis Price Facebook tribute page too. And, after years when Kind Hearts and Coronets was promoted as ‘Alec Guinness’s film‘, Price’s contribution is now fully recognised. You can’t keep a good man down.
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