EastEnders legend Perry Fenwick has revealed that he almost died not once, but twice, as a child!
Speaking to Kathy Burke on her podcast Where There’s A Will There’s A Wake, the Billy Mitchell actor told the shocking – quite literally in one case – stories of the times he nearly lost his life.
‘From the age of none to ten, I think I spent quite a lot of that time in hospital,’ Perry revealed.
‘I electrocuted myself when I was three. I was playing with a bowl of soapy water on the rug, and I thought how interesting it would be to put those three fingers of mine in the water and put them in that plug hole in the wall.
‘At which point, my mum is watching television and was aware of this ‘thing’ going right across to the other side of the room. Apparently, the palms of my hands were black for about six months after that.’
As if that wasn’t dramatic enough, the actor went on to recall the time he fell off a bridge, leaving his friends terrified.
‘I fell off a bridge. We used to have an iron bridge near where I lived, and you used to have to do this dare where you walked over the arch of this bridge. I had a wobble, fell off of it, and it was about twenty-five to thirty feet.
‘There was a little stream running underneath it with these mud banks next to it and luckily for me someone had got into DIY early by removing some of the railway sleepers, otherwise as this was in the 60’s, if I would have hit one of them, that would have been it.
‘I went right the way through, and I landed in the mud bank, and it was so soft that I literally just went *squelch*.’
Having been dared to attempt the dangerous crossing, young Perry decided to have a bit of fun by playing his own trick on his mates.
‘So, then I could hear the kids who had dared me, my mates, and this young girl who I fancied at the time; I was only about ten or eleven. As I’m lying there, in that millisecond, guess what I did? I played dead.
‘I decided, even at that age the actor in me just wanted to see what did they think of me.
‘So, I stayed there, and I could hear them all going “he’s not moving, call the police, no we aren’t going to call the police, we’ll have to go to prison”.
‘I could hear them getting closer and closer but only so far, and I’m waiting for the girl to talk. Then someone said, “is he dead?”, and I was thinking “come on, one of you say something nice, at least be concerned!”.
‘Then the girl that I really fancied just went “throw a stone at him”. So, I’m lying there waiting for this kiss of life from this girl, and the next thing I get is a stone in the back of my head!’
During his time playing Billy Mitchell, Perry has become an EastEnders stalwart, though he admits that he almost gave up acting altogether, instead opting to learn ‘the knowledge’ required to become a black cab driver.
‘I was at the point of knocking the acting on the head because as you said I did a hell of a lot of work and then it just dried up. I was about to start ‘the knowledge’,’ He told Kathy.
‘I just thought “well, I’m good at learning lines so learning the knowledge might be the way forward”, but then they rung up the agent and said about EastEnders and I thought “oh, I could do with that now”.’
After 25 years on Albert Square, Perry was recently involved in a heartbreaking and ‘punishing’ storyline which saw Billy lose granddaughter Lola Pearce (Danielle Harold) to a brain tumour.
‘She started the show, Danielle Harold, beautiful, fantastic talented Danielle Harold, as not a little girl, but she was young,’ Perry explained.
‘I haven’t got any kids, and she has been like a daughter to me. So, when we knew that this story was going to happen there was this thing going on which was like my character Billy was losing his granddaughter and Perry was losing his daughter, and it got harder and harder Kath.
‘You’re going into work every day and you’d look at the script and it was just punishing.’
Where There’s a Will There’s A Wake is available to listen to on all podcast platforms.