So, Basically, You Lost It?: Tony Slattery, 1959-2025

This week is determined to make me think of high school. This morning, in the mail, I received a copy of the soundtrack to The Crow, a tape that was in constant rotation with some of my friends in those days. (The copy I just got was on CD, though.) Not to mention, you know, all the depressing pictures of my hometown on the news. And today, in other losses that would have devastated me in high school, we’ve gotten the news that Tony Slattery died. I watched him so often on Whose Line Is It Anyway? He was easily one of my top five, in those days, for several reasons.

Slattery actually got involved in comedy in part with the help of another member of the ranks of Funny Bipolar People. He was at Cambridge when he discovered that he loved making people laugh—probably he knew for some time that he was good at it—and met Stephen Fry, who encouraged him to join the Footlights. There, he worked with Huge Names Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie and Deeply Significant To My Adolescence Names Richard Vranch, Sandi Toksvig, and Rory McGrath. He was the 1982 president of the Footlights.

From there, he went on to one of the British Comedian Careers wherein you see them in a lot of things but they’re seldom a huge deal in and of themselves. Mostly he was a guest on things. He’s got a ton of appearances as “self,” including 38 episodes of Whose Line—the original British version, of course. Mostly, he has a lot of single-episode appearances on minor British shows, but he was always a delight when you saw him. He may have been lousy at things like “Hoedown,” but everyone is lousy at “Hoedown,” and he was funny and good at improvising, the latter of which Stephen Fry has never really managed.

He did, on the other hand, do some real acting. The first R-rated movie I saw alone in a theatre was The Crying Game, and I expressed delight at his brief, scene-stealing appearance as Stephen Rea’s employer in it. He had a sitcom I’ve never heard of, and his final acting appearance not as himself was in Kingdom, with Stephen Fry. He was a regular as the weird, squirrely Sidney Snell. That’s a weird show and he’s great fun on it.

His personal life was darker. He was apparently molested by the family priest as a child. He was, as alluded to, bipolar. He struggled with addiction to alcohol and cocaine; he and Stephen King and Matthew Perry could’ve had long conversations about what it’s like to simply not remember part of your life because of the drugs. He spent six months as a recluse. On the other hand, he seems to have spent forty years in a relationship with fellow actor Mark Michael Hutchinson, so that must have been at least one source of stability. Gods know he needed it.