Tony Slattery was just emerging from lifelong battle with ‘dark demons’ before his tragic death aged 65, friend Stephen Fry reveals – after comedian laid bare his £4k-a-week cocaine habit and alcoholism in harrowing detail

Troubled comedian and actor Tony Slattery had just started to emerge from his ‘lifelong battle with dark demons’ before his death aged 65, his close friend Stephen Fry revealed today.

Slattery, who was best known for starring on Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway?, has died following a heart attack after years fighting addiction to cocaine and alcohol as well as a battle with bipolar disorder and depression.

An alum of the world famous Cambridge Footlight set alongside Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, Slattery cemented himself as one of the most gifted TV comedians of the late 80s and early 90s.

The comic, who was born in November 1959, became a household name on Whose Line Is It Anyway? before suddenly vanishing from our screens amid battles with addiction and breakdowns. 

In 2019, Slattery gave his first TV interview in 14 years where he detailed his harrowing battle with addiction and bipolar disorder. 

At his lowest moments he was spending £4,000 a week on his drug habit, taking 10 grams of cocaine and downing two bottles of vodka each day. He credited his lifelong partner, Mark Michael Hutchinson, with keeping him alive.

‘The overwork, no holidays, no taking a break, eventually you snap, you try to replace it with something. In my case, it was cocaine,’ he said on This Morning at the time. 

‘Then the booze came along, then the depression set in… I was drinking two bottles of vodka a day and doing 10 grams of coke.’

In 2020, the comic also heartbreakingly revealed that he had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest when he was eight. And he spoke candidly about experiencing paranoia, including how he was driven to throwing electrical devices into the River Thames from his luxury warehouse because he thought he was being spied on.

But Fry, a lifelong friend, today revealed how Slattery was ‘snatched’ from us after recovering and finding himself in a good place.

Sharing a photo of the pair with Laurie, Emma Freud and Jennifer Saunders, Fry said Slattery was ‘wonderful’ and ‘just about the gentlest, sweetest soul I ever knew. Not to mention a screamingly funny and deeply talented wit and clown’.

He added: ‘A cruel irony that fate should snatch him from us just as he had really begun to emerge from his lifelong battle with so many dark demons. He had started live “evenings with” and his own podcast series. Lovely, at least, this past year for him to have found to his joyous surprise that he was still remembered and held in great affection’.

Slattery was last seen in an Instagram post on Christmas Day where he wore a tinsel and holly scarf and fans of his new podcast, the Rambling Club, remarked on how well he looked. 

In his BBC Two Horizon documentary What’s The Matter With Tony Slattery?, the comic told Fry: ‘No one in their right mind chooses to be depressed.’ 

He spoke openly about taking ‘too much booze, too much drugs’ amid his rise to fame.

‘I think that’s partly it,’ he said. ‘I rented this stupid, huge, luxury warehouse overlooking the Thames but i was so nutty I threw loads of stuff in the Thames.

‘I used to stay up for four days and then the paranoia. I thought everything was bugged, I became obsessed with electrical equipment and chucked it all into the Thames.

‘My grip on time and how it passes became very fuzzy. I think I just got bloody exhausted and withdrew.  

His partner of 40 years, Mr Hutchinson, told the documentary: ‘I’d have to try and talk him down, he kept mentioning he was being spied on, people were breaking into the  apartment, people were destroying things, it became apparent he was becoming a danger to himself and needed help.’

Slattery said he had been ‘genuinely moved’ by the reaction to the documentary and all the messages of ‘love, kindness and support’ he received. 

It was Mr Hutchinson, who met his late partner while starring in the musical Me and My Girl in the West End in 1986, who revealed his death, saying: ‘It is with great sadness we must announce actor and comedian Tony Slattery, aged 65, has passed away today, Tuesday morning, following a heart attack on Sunday evening.’

The son of an Irish Heinz factory worker, who grew up as the youngest of five on a Willesden council estate, Tony became a household name on appeared on comedy shows including Whose Line Is It Anyway, Just A Minute and Have I Got News For You. 

Mr Slattery was one of the most academic state school students in the 1970s, winning a prestigious scholarship to the University of Cambridge to read medieval languages. 

He was the contemporary of Dame Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – where he was president of the improvisation group The Cambridge Footlights in the early 1980s. 

Alongside Sir Stephen and Dame Emma, he was the winner of the first Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe. 

But he suffered a breakdown in 1996, when he was one of the most famous comedians in the UK.

Tony was last seen on TV five years ago in a documentary about the link between depression and addiction. But he had recently been touring a comedy show in England and launched a podcast, Tony Slattery’s Rambling Club, in October.

Tony said in 2017 that he thought it was a ‘miracle’ he lived as long as he did due to his addiction but admitted his partner Mark had kept him ‘alive’ during their relationship of almost 40 years.

Outside of stand-up, Slattery appeared in 1980s and 1990s films including crime thriller The Crying Game, Peter’s Friends with Laurie, Sir Stephen and Dame Emma, and black comedy How To Get Ahead In Advertising with Richard E Grant.

He also had prominent roles in the theatre, which including receiving a 1995 Olivier Award nod for best comedy performance for the Tim Firth play Neville’s Island, which was later made into a film starring Timothy Spall, and starring in Second World War-set production Privates On Parade, based on the film of the same name, as ace impersonator Captain Terri Dennis.

His West End debut was in the 1930s-style musical Radio Times, and on TV he also played a detective in Tiger Bastable, a gentlemen comedy spoof, and the title character in sitcom Just A Gigolo.

Slattery – who regularly spoke openly about his bipolar disorder – revealed he went bankrupt following a battle with substance abuse and mental health issues.

In a 2019 interview with This Morning, Tony revealed he had once bought £4,000 worth of cocaine each week and copious amounts of vodka.

At the time he explained he had been on anti-depressants for 15 years and could not imagine life without them or without alcohol. 

He told the Radio Times that his ‘fiscal illiteracy and general innumeracy’ as well as his ‘misplaced trust in people’ had also contributed to his money problems.

He said: ‘If you’re not born into money, you don’t know when it’s going to stop, you think it’s streak of luck. I really enjoyed working but all work no play take its toll.

‘The overwork, no holidays, no taking a break, eventually you snap, you try to replace it with something. In my case, it was cocaine. 

‘Then the booze came along, then the depression set in… I was drinking two bottles of vodka a day and doing 10 grams of coke.’

Tony also touched upon the moment he gave up cocaine, saying it was the shame of his mother discovering £160,000 worth of cheques stuffed behind his sofa.

Admitting he was financially ‘naive’, Tony had been stashing cash from his agents there because he didn’t know what to do with them. 

After quitting his drug habit, he sent it off for toxicology report, which found he had actually been snorting 5 per cent cocaine, cut glass and – to his horror, human and animal faeces. 

Talking about his experience with the drug, he said: ‘It’s not fun, I wouldn’t recommend it, the devil’s dandruff, it heightens makes you uninterruptible, irrational, disinterested.’  

In the midst of his woes, Tony met with a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that affects your moods, which can swing from one extreme to another.

‘Something else there, there’s something darker there, bipolarity. Stigma is getting better about mental illness, bipolarity is like autism or any disease, it’s a huge spectrum, it’s everything in between’, he explained.

‘It was unravelling, to use a cliché, you’ve got a cut infected by a microbe long time to find out what it is, what you need to take.

‘I am interested into the whole aspect of bipolarity how it used to be, rather dismiss it as he’s a bit moody, one day he’s this and another that.’

He said: ‘The isolation that comes with bipolarity and depression, you alienate people. They want to like you and love you, if you don’t answer messages that’s all they can do.’

Thankfully, the TV personality was able to stay afloat thanks to his ‘incredible’ partner of 35 years, Mark, who managed to stop him from isolating himself.

He recalled: ‘I met him in a musical, Me and My Girl, we were both very shy and didn’t speak to each for six months. 

‘Our eyes lingered just a bit too long [on one occasion] – without him I’d be dead no question about that!’

Tony made light of how times have changed, saying that people forget he’s still alive.

Discussing his Edinburgh Fringe show, Tony joked: ‘People come up to me at the Fringe and say: ‘God, I thought you were dead.”

He had previously appeared in 2006 BBC Two programme The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive to speak about his condition.

He said: ‘I rented a huge warehouse by the River Thames. I just stayed in there on my own, didn’t open the mail or answer the phone for months and months and months.

‘I was just in a pool of rapid cycling despair and mania.’

Slattery released the BBC Two Horizon documentary What’s The Matter With Tony Slattery? in the same year, which saw him and Hutchinson visit leading experts on mood disorders and addiction.

Slattery is survived by his partner of more than three decades, the actor Hutchinson.

Mark met Tony when they starred in a 1986 West End musical. 

Speaking in 2020 he admitted that caring for him is a challenge, describing him as ‘always on the edge’ and ‘erratic’, saying he’s seen ‘dozens’ of versions of Tony over the years. 

Mark, who met Tony at the height of his career, said: ‘It’s tiring caring for someone, loving someone who is constantly on the edge.’

‘I don’t know where the alcohol stops and where the depression starts.’ 

‘You don’t know what to prioritise or treat first: is it because of the alcohol or is it depression,’ he adds. 

Speaking candidly about his partner’s troubles with substance abuse, he admitted to having left him on a few occasions over the years. 

‘I’ve run away a couples times, I’d go away for a couple of weeks,’ he says, adding he would always come back because he couldn’t stand being apart from Tony.

Mr Slattery said in 2017 that it was a ‘minor miracle’ he was still alive, having been rushed to hospital.

He said: ‘The first time, I realised I couldn’t get up from my chair, and managed to call 999′. He had pneumonia, one fully working lung and sepsis.

Tony pulled through and then collapsed two months later.

‘There was so much pain in my stomach, I couldn’t speak’, he said.

‘Part of my lower bowel had knotted so they took out a section of my gut. I lost three stone in four weeks’.

20 years earlier, after years of fame, he became a recluse.

‘I felt I had used a lot of myself up, in the wrong way, and I had enough of it, really. I felt I had become a light entertainment construct – there was an intense feeling of waste, and self-hatred’, he said.

‘I was a scampering puppy. I didn’t take holidays. I wasn’t born into money. So I kept saying ‘Yes’. I think people started to think ‘Oh, not him again!’ And so I stopped’.

He then considered suicide. 

‘For some reason, one night I took all my clothes off, then went down to [my block’s] underground car-park and lay under a car. I got bitten on my feet by rats while I was lying there’, he said.   

‘I think I must be the only person in showbiz who’s been tested for plague’.

He said that a doctor was shocked about how much cocaine he was taking.

‘At the peak, I was taking 10g a day. A specialist said ‘You must be exaggerating, you wouldn’t have a nose left’. But I think I was snorting so much, so fast, it didn’t have time to touch the sides. That’s the only reason I’ve still got a septum’.