When Celebrities Go Nuts (Part Three)

Doctor in the House star Robin Nedwell was not the first make-believe medic to attempt to live out his screen role in reality. During the 1940s noted horror star Boris Karloff portrayed so many mad doctors and scientists in B-movies that he began to live the part in teal life, conducting bizarre experiments in makeshift laboratory he constructed in the garage of his Beverley Hills home. “He was always concocting strange potions and getting his friends to unwittingly test them by claiming that they were new cocktails”, recalled Peter Lorre in 1966. He once gave Basil Rathbone a strange smoking concoction which resulted in the Sherlock Holmes actor’s pubic hair falling out and his penis turning green and becoming grotesquely swollen.

Horror film actors seem particularly prone to confusing their real and celluloid lives. It has been well documented elsewhere how in 1934 Claude Raines came to believe that he actually was the Invisible Man. For several months he ran around Los Angeles stark naked, waving his penis at women and urinating on studio executives, in the belief that he couldn’t be seen. Lon Chaney Jnr suffered similar delusions when, in 1944, he took to shuffling around the dark alleyways of Hollywood in full Egyptian mummy make-up, occasionally leaping out at passers by and attempting to throttle them. In 1945 a local prostitute told the Hollywood Reporter that Chaney had visited her in his mummy costume and insisted that she dress up as ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and lie in a sarcophagus whilst he masturbated over her. “Even his penis was bandaged up like a mummy - he was truly obsessed”, she told the newspaper. “When he ejaculated, a huge cloud of dust erupted from his whang. I’ve never figured out how he managed that!”