Vivian MacKerrell: The Flatmate Who Inspired Withnail, and Whose Real Life Was Even Stranger

Jul 21
7 min read

Collage with headline about Vivian MacKerrell, a black-and-white portrait, handwritten diary pages, and a faded photo.

In Withnail and I, one of the most quoted scenes in British cinema has Withnail drink lighter fluid, straight from the can, out of sheer desperation for a drink. It plays as pitch-black comedy. It also really happened. The man who actually drank the lighter fluid was Vivian MacKerrell, a jobbing actor who shared a squalid flat in Camden with the young Bruce Robinson in the late 1960s, and who inadvertently became the basis for one of the most beloved characters in British film history without ever appearing in it, without ever seeing it made, and without ever quite becoming the actor he wanted to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCJ2gzSeTdE

A Well-Off Family, a Restless Son

Vivian Alan James MacKerrell was born on 23 May 1944 in London, the son of John Alexander MacKerrell, a Scottish accountant, and Janetta Mary MacKerrell, née Boyns. The family was comfortably well off, and Vivian was sent to train formally as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, one of the more prestigious drama schools in the country. He had, by every account, real charisma and real talent. What he never quite had was the discipline, or the luck, to turn either into a career.

In 1964, still in his early twenties, he appeared on stage in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning alongside a young Ian McKellen, one of the few genuinely notable credits of his career. Beyond that, his acting work amounted to small parts: a role as "Fourth Tramp" in a BBC play, a bit part in a film about a doll that comes to life, and a supporting role in the 1974 British horror film Ghost Story (also released as Madhouse Mansion), alongside Marianne Faithfull and Penelope Keith. It remains his only substantial screen credit. His IMDB entry, tellingly, still lists him under the wrong gender.

Bruce Robinson (Left) Vivian MacKerrell is stood at the back

Camden Town and the Real Withnail

In the late 1960s, MacKerrell shared a house on Albert Street in Camden Town with a group of friends including a young, similarly unsuccessful actor and aspiring writer named Bruce Robinson. The house was, by every surviving account, cold, mouse-infested, and permanently short of both money and food. It was exactly the kind of bohemian squalor that would, two decades later, become the setting of Withnail and I.

Robinson has always been careful about how directly he links MacKerrell to the character. "Everyone keeps saying they were Withnail, and they weren't," he has said. "We were all Withnail and we were all 'I'." But when pressed on who, if anyone, the character was actually based on, his answer has been consistent: "If there is a person Withnail is based on, it's Vivian MacKerrell."

The most famous scene traced directly back to MacKerrell is the lighter fluid. He genuinely drank it, during the Camden years, in a moment of desperation when there was nothing else in the flat. He was left unable to see properly for several days afterwards. Robinson has said since that he suspects the incident may have contributed to the throat cancer that eventually killed his friend decades later. The trip to see the wolves at Regent's Park, another scene lifted almost directly from life, also really happened, and MacKerrell recorded it in his own diaries at the time.

Not every incident in the film traces back to MacKerrell specifically. The disastrous countryside trip that forms the bulk of the plot was drawn from a holiday Robinson took to the Lake District with a different flatmate, the actor Mickey Feast, driving a Jaguar borrowed from Robinson's then-girlfriend, the actress Lesley-Anne Down. The flamboyant, predatory Uncle Monty was drawn directly from Franco Zeffirelli. Robinson had played Benvolio in Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet as a teenager, and based Monty's theatrical, unwanted affections on his own experience of the director off-set. Marwood, the character played by Paul McGann and credited on screen only as 'I', is Robinson himself, a fictionalised version of his own penniless, aspiring years scraping by in London. Between the two of them, Withnail and I is a film built almost entirely from people Robinson actually knew.

Robinson later put it more starkly in his introduction to the published screenplay: "There isn't a line of Viv's in Withnail and I, but his horrible wine-stained tongue may well have spoken every word. Without Viv, this story could never have been written."

Style Without Success

MacKerrell was, by every description of him, extraordinary company and a genuine original, even as his career went nowhere. The fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, who knew him during his later Nottingham years, remembered him as "incredibly handsome" and effortlessly stylish, "even in the way he could roll a perfect cigarette." Director Stephen Weeks, who cast him in Ghost Story, recalled MacKerrell having a beautiful green silk suit made for himself in India, only to get drunk at a ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel, vomit on it, and abandon it in a drawer without a second thought.

That combination, real charm and real waste, ran through nearly everything anyone remembered about him. He was, in the words of one former housemate, "a splenetic wastrel of a fop." Robinson, more affectionately, called him the funniest person he'd ever met.

Nottingham, Paul Smith, and a Quieter Fade

By the mid-1970s, MacKerrell's acting career had effectively stalled, and he drifted back to Nottingham, where he'd grown up, and where Paul Smith was building what would become one of Britain's best-known fashion labels. MacKerrell worked for Smith for a period and became a well-known fixture of Nottingham's pub scene, the kind of person locals recognised even if they didn't quite know why. It was in a back room of the Paul Smith shop, before Withnail and I was released, that MacKerrell first mentioned to acquaintances that "someone was writing a film about him." Most people shrugged it off.

Diagnosis and Death

MacKerrell was diagnosed with throat cancer in his forties. He went into a brief remission in the mid-1980s, but the disease returned, and he underwent a laryngectomy, the surgical removal of his voice box. Bruce Robinson later described the transformation this forced on his old friend in devastating terms:

"I can't believe Vivian is dead. He got cancer of the throat and they tore his voice out. And the fellow I'd always thought of as being the biggest coward I'd ever met materialised into the bravest bastard I'd ever known. It's got to be hard to laugh when you're dying, but I'll always remember you laughing. That sad, brilliant, bitter face of yours laughing… Goodbye my darling friend. I know if there's a pub in heaven you'll be in it. And Keats will be buying the drinks."

Vivian MacKerrell died on 2 March 1995 in Gloucester, aged 50. Richard E. Grant, who had played the character based on him to widespread acclaim eight years earlier, never once met him. Robinson actively discouraged the meeting, apparently protective of both men, or perhaps unwilling to let the fiction and the man collide while MacKerrell was still alive.

The Diaries

MacKerrell kept diaries throughout the Camden years, and two surviving volumes, covering 1974 and 1975, resurfaced decades after his death. They record, in his own words, a version of exactly the life Withnail and I would later dramatise: benefit payments spent on cheap wine, long afternoons in the pub, and the same wolves in Regent's Park that made it into the film. One entry reads simply: "Lennie came over & I drank some lighter fuel - got frantic & burst into tears - walk in the park & bed at 5AM." Another, quieter moment describes an evening reading and correcting an early draft of the Withnail and I script itself, then opening a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé that had been chilling in the window box.

In 2024, the diaries, along with a set of previously unseen photographs including negatives from a Vogue shoot, were consigned to Sotheby's in London, estimated to sell for between £12,000 and £18,000. Gabriel Heaton, the auction house's books and manuscripts specialist, called them "a wonderful discovery," describing MacKerrell's diary voice as "witty, acrid, unapologetic and melancholy." The lot was withdrawn from sale shortly before the auction, without public explanation, and MacKerrell's private words remain, for now, out of public view again.

Vivian and I

In 2010, writer Colin Bacon published Vivian and I, a biography that attempted to properly document MacKerrell's life beyond his connection to the film. Bacon has said Robinson was initially reluctant to cooperate, having said what he wanted to say about Withnail and I already, and was particularly unhappy when Bacon considered titling the book In Search of Withnail. The book that resulted is still the fullest account of a man who, by any conventional measure, achieved very little, and who nonetheless became, through someone else's memory of him, one of the most vividly drawn characters in British film.

Withnail and I ends with the character alone, delivering Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" speech to a pen of wolves in the rain, abandoned by the friend who is moving on with his life. MacKerrell's real ending was quieter and came fifteen years later, in a Gloucester hospital, decades after the version of him that mattered to the rest of the world had already been written down and left behind in a Camden flat he no longer lived in.