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

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...