FilmFour Website – December, 2002

By Mark Morris.

Withnail is one of the most abiding – and, with his determination to drink lighter fluid, downright grim – characters in British cinema. In reality, he was based on Bruce Robinson’s friend, would-be actor Vivian MacKerrell. His exploits made Withnail’s pale.

“Everyone keeps saying they were Withnail, and they weren’t,” claims writer/director Bruce Robinson, the only person in the position to know. The incidents that happened to Withnail involved a number of Robinson’s friends: for instance, Mickey Feast, then in the cast of ‘Hair’ and now a respected Shakespearean actor, was Robinson’s companion on the ill-fated trip to the Lakes which became the trip to the country in the film. But Withnail himself has one source. “If there is a person Withnail is based on, it’s Vivian MacKerrell.”

Described by Robinson as “wild, aristocratic and highly educated”, MacKerrell was one of the many people – along with Robinson and Feast – who lived in the Camden house bought by their wealthy drama school friend, composer David Dundas, (who worked as music supervisor on Withnail And I).

According to Robinson, “We had lot of expectations that we would all become film stars, which of course never happened. People were getting married or getting jobs until there was just me and Vivian living in the house. I literally had one light bulb. I guarded it like a Russian prisoner of war.

At night I’d take the light bulb up and put it in the bedroom, and in the day I’d go down and put it in the kitchen and get the oven open, sit there in an overcoat and get warm.”

Robinson’s companion through the worst of it was MacKerrell. The scene where they drink lighter fuel in the film comes from something MacKerrell actually did: he couldn’t see for days afterwards and Robinson suspects it might have caused the throat cancer that eventually killed his friend.

Robinson knew it had to end when MacKerrell returned from a trip home to Scotland armed with bottles of a drink – 200 per cent proof, Robinson claims – that distillery workers made by sticking used whisky filters into spin driers.

Deranged by the drink, Robinson and MacKerrell, armed with a hammer and an artificial leg, smashed one of the walls of their house down. It still took another six months for Robinson and MacKerrell to work up the will go their separate ways.

Although his friends were fascinated by him, MacKerrell’s career – like Withnail’s – was one of overwhelming obscurity, best summed up by the fact that the IMDB spells his name wrong and lists him as an actress. His only screen appearance seems to have been in a 1974 British horror film called Ghost Story (aka Madhouse Mansion), which starred Marianne Faithfull and had Penelope Keith in the cast.

The film’s director Stephen Weeks has fond memories of MacKerrell. “He had a wonderful silk suit made for himself in India, green and beautifully made.

When he got back he went to a ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel, got drunk, threw up over it and then just put it in a drawer and left it. This wonderful suit! About three years later he found it, by which time it was destroyed. That was typical of him really.”

To no one’s surprise, Vivian MacKerrell died young. “The poor bastard’s dead now,” is how Robinson puts it. But the indelible impression he left on his friends provided the basis for British film’s most eloquent drunk.

Mark Morris.

NOTE: To see some pictures of Vivian MacKerrell, click here.