Stephen Fry has revealed he had to be brought back to the UK to be "looked after" last year after attempting to take his own life while filming abroad. In a candid interview for comic Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, the actor said, "I took a huge amount of pills and a huge (amount) of vodka…
"Fortunately, the producer I was filming with at the time came into the hotel room and I was found in a sort of unconscious state, and taken back to England and looked after. "He said it was a "close-run thing".Stephen, 55, made the frank admission in front of a live audience. It was, he said, the first time he had said in public that he is "not always happy"."You may say, 'How can anybody who's got it all be so stupid as to want to end it all?'. That's the point, there is no 'why'. That's not the right question," he said. "There is no reason. If there was reason for it, you could reason someone out of it. "I am the victim of my own moods, more than most people are perhaps, in as much as I have a condition which requires me to take medication so that I don't get either too hyper or too depressed to the point of suicide," he added.
His honest admission came in response to an innocuous question: "What's it like to be Stephen Fry?". As president of mental health charity Mind, the star said he felt a duty to speak out honestly.
The popular TV star, who was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and describes himself as 'bipolar lite', has spoken publically about his struggles with mental health issues in the past. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1995 while appearing in a West End play called Cell Mates and walked out of the production, prompting its early closure.He also spoke about his experience with bipolar disorder in a BBC documentary, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.