This month marks the 50th anniversary of the sad death of the actor Dennis Price, star of the classic 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, regarded by many to be the greatest British film of all time. Price was only 58 when he died from cirrhosis of the liver and complications following a broken hip, in a public ward of Guernsey’s main hospital. In the same way his co-star Alec Guinness stole the limelight in Kind Hearts, so the shock break-out of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war did the same on the day of his death.
His debts caused him to ‘beat a strategic retreat’ to the Channel Islands where the booze was cheap and the taxman couldn’t bother him
Price’s demise may not have been front-page news in 1973 but the sense of loss of all who knew him was great. Patrick Macnee described him as ‘one of the sweetest men who ever lived’.
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