Danny Dyer says death of mentor Harold Pinter sent him into ‘spiral of madness’

Actor Danny Dyer has said the death of his mentor, playwright Harold Pinter, sent him into a “spiral of madness”.

The Nobel Prize-winning playwright cast former EastEnders actor Dyer, 47, in his play Celebration, which was first staged at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2000.

Dyer told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that he would stay at the playwright’s house and learn about famous writers and poets like WH Auden and CS Lewis.

In 2001 the play was transferred to New York’s Lincoln Centre and during one performance Dyer forgot his lines on stage and had an “anxiety attack”, having taken drugs and stayed out the night before.

Dyer felt “so bad about letting him (Pinter) down” but said the playwright put his arm around him and made him “feel better about it”.

Reflecting on his death in 2008, he said: “I hadn’t spoke to him in a while. I did go off the rails for many years, and I found out by looking on the front of a newspaper.

“Again, I’d been on a bender and I was coming home and I was going, I think I was going to buy cigarettes at the petrol garage, and I see it in the paper. ‘Pinter dead’.

“This really sent me on a spiral of madness, really.

“The guilt of not being around him anymore and just being lost, I was a bit of a lost soul, and again, angry at the world.”

In April, US publication Deadline reported that Dyer was developing an idea for a play about his relationship with Pinter, whom he referred to as his “mentor”.

Dyer, who had his breakthrough in the 1999 film Human Traffic, also reflected on some of the documentaries he had made earlier in his career.

In the noughties the actor presented TV series Danny Dyer’s Real Football Factories and Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, the latter of which saw him interview gangsters and former terrorists.

“I’d made a few films and I just wasn’t getting paid any money, and I was desperate to get onto the property ladder”, he said.

“I was still living in a council estate at Custom House, living with my daughter (Dani) and (wife) Jo, and it’s like, well, I’m famous, but I’m still living on a council estate.

“And so then my house became a bit like Stonehenge, my little flat, and people would just stand outside waiting for me.”

He continued: “There was a moment where someone tried to burgle our house and I was like ‘we can’t live here no more’.”

“So I got offered to do a documentary with a real football veteran and I couldn’t believe the money they was offering me, I thought, ‘Oh, wow'”, he said.

“Now I hated it, because I didn’t have a script, it was me on my own interviewing people, and interviewing dangerous people, by the way, but it got me on the property ladder.”

Asked if he was worried about being typecast, he said: “I didn’t have the luxury. You know, it’s a bit uncouth, I can’t watch them back now, I cringe at them.

“But, you know, I needed to earn money, and I needed to get a house, and I needed to do the right thing.”

Danny Dyer’s episode of Desert Island Discs will air at 10am on BBC Radio 4 and will also be available on BBC Sounds.