Peter Cushing - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1971, Cushing withdrew from the film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb when his wife died. He and actress Helen Beck (8 February 1905 – 14 January 1971) had been married since 1943. The following year, he was quoted in the Radio Times as saying, "Since Helen passed on I can't find anything; the heart, quite simply, has gone out of everything. Time is interminable, the loneliness is almost unbearable and the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that my dear Helen and I will be reunited again some day. To join Helen is my only ambition. You have my permission to publish that... really, you know dear boy, it's all just killing time. Please say that."

In his autobiography, he implies that he attempted suicide the night that his wife died, by running up and down stairs in the vain hope that it would induce a heart attack. He later stated that this was a hysterical reaction to his wife's death, and that he was not consciously trying to end his life - a poem left by his wife urged him not to end his life until he had lived it to the full, and thus he felt that ending his life would have been letting his wife down. Though he didn't consider himself religious he also had strong ethical beliefs.

In 1986 Cushing appeared on the BBC TV show Jim'll Fix It, his wish being to have a strain of rose named after his late wife Helen Cushing.

The effects of Helen's death proved physical as well. For his role in Dracula AD 1972, Cushing had been intended to play the father of Stephanie Beacham's character, but had visibly aged so much and lost so much weight that the script was hastily rewritten to make him her grandfather. In a quiet tribute to Helen, a shot of Van Helsing's desk shows a photo of her.