page_title: John R. Buckmaster
section_title: Mental illness and death
hierarchical_section_title: John R. Buckmaster / Mental illness and death
caption_attribution_description: English: The Priory Hospital, Roehampton, London
context_page_description: John Rodney Buckmaster was an English actor on the stage, in films and on television, and a cabaret singer-songwriter. He was the son of actress Gladys Cooper and Captain Herbert Buckmaster. Educated at Eton College, he followed his mother into the acting profession and worked on both sides of the Atlantic.
  During World War II, he served for a time as a private in the United States Army Air Forces before resuming his acting career until the mid-1950s. He suffered increasingly from mental illness, which led to his confinement at the Priory Hospital, where he committed suicide on 1 April 1983.
context_section_description: In the summer of 1945, when they were both on leave at the family home in California, Jack Merivale noticed uneasiness in Buckmaster's relationship with his mother: "Whenever I'm with her, I feel I'm always doing the wrong thing, whatever it is."
  At the end of the Lady Windermere's Fan run in the spring of 1947, Buckmaster suffered the first of the regular mental breakdowns which became increasingly violent over the following decade, even though shock treatment was at first successful in containing his acute schizophrenia. In his 1979 biography of Gladys Cooper, her grandson Sheridan Morley summarised the presumed causes of Buckmaster's condition:
  In February 1952, Buckmaster, having just finished a highly successful and critically acclaimed Broadway run as the Dauphin in St Joan, had the worst and most violent of his mental breakdowns. Accused of molesting women on the corner of Madison Avenue and 67th Street at 7 am, he was chased through the streets of Manhattan, arrested, and charged with felonious assault and the illegal possession of two knives which he was alleged to have brandished at the police. He was committed to the Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric check, and then transferred to the State Hospital for the mentally ill at Kings Park, Long Island, from where his release was eventually secured by Jack Merivale and Noel Coward.
  In mid-March 1953, Buckmaster visited Vivien Leigh, who was filming Elephant Walk in Hollywood and had rented a mansion on Hanover Drive, while Olivier was in Ischia on a break from organising theatrical and film events for the Queen's coronation that summer. Leigh was going through one of her psychotic breakdowns at the time and the studio doctor and psychiatrist had organised round the clock care for her, in which David Niven became involved. After Buckmaster had unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Leigh that they could fly out of an upper window together, Niven called Stewart Granger and asked him to intervene by forcibly removing Buckmaster from the house and driving him back to his hotel.
  By 1960, Buckmaster was settled into the Priory Hospital where he would spend the rest of his life. He steadfastly declined visits from either of his parents, blaming them for his breakdowns. He committed suicide there on 1 April 1983.
caption: The Priory Hospital
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