One of Matthew Perry’s former flames has revealed the sweet gift he gave months before his shock death aged 54.
Gilmore Girls actress Lauren Graham, 57, casually dated the Friends actor in the early 2000s and remained close to him in his final years.
Speaking at the Lincoln Theater in Washington DC on Friday, she reminisced on their time together while promoting her new book, Have I Told You This Already?
This included how the Chandler Bing actor, who was an avid fan of the racquet ball game pickleball, gifted her a pickleball set for her birthday in March last year, just months before his death.
According to Deadline, she also revealed the poignant note attached, which read "Be Older”.
Speaking of their relationship, she added: "While he was not technically ever a boyfriend, he was an almost in my life,” explaining that the late actor was "a friend and a constant".
"We would stretch for a year, then he would come back in my life, and he had just come back in my life last year," she said.
The two were linked back in 2003 although an official romance was never confirmed. Only flirting was mentioned by Graham and a few months after, Perry was single again, with no apparent bad blood between the pair, and them even working together in the future.
Addressing their complicated relationship in her 2016 memoir Talking as Fast as I Can, Graham referred to him as a false start. She claimed the pair met at an event and exchanged flirtations but never took it beyond that. She said that Canadian-born Perry turned her into a "Friend Who I Almost But Never Exactly Dated or her FWIABNED."
Perry was found dead in the outdoor hot tub of his Los Angeles home on October 28 with his cause of death being ruled as an accident from the effects of ketamine.
While the star had been open about his struggles with alcohol and substance abuse in the past, he had claimed he was clean in the 18 months leading up to his passing.
