Stephen Fry has told how he attempted to take his own life as a teenager in a candid new interview.
The actor, 65, admitted that he felt “lost and adrift” during his “disastrous childhood” after he was expelled from multiple schools.
Following his expulsions, the comedian, who has bipolar disorder, told the Diary of A CEO podcast that he attempted suicide aged 17.
He said frankly: “Really what I first wanted to do was to take my life.”
The writer then recalled how he was convicted of credit card fraud after moving to London which led to a spell at Pucklechurch Prison.
He shared how stole a coat from a pub and later realised it had a wallet with two credit cards in it, which were “very easy to use fraudulently.”
After using them to live lavishly across the country, Fry was arrested and sent to prison on remand for three months and was later given two years’ probation.
Following his run-in with the law, he said: “So, the best I could do after a disastrous childhood, I decided, was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge.
“That changed everything…I want to please people. And if I don’t please them, I get upset. I’ve done it wrong.”
Fry also reflected on being sent to a boarding school in Gloucestershire aged seven and explained how he began doing “weird things” after falling in love with a boy when he was 13.
He said: “I started doing weird things like climbing all the roofs. That was the first school I was expelled from. Then I left home and went to London.”
Soon after he was expelled from his first school, his parents took him to see a psychiatrist and although medics recognised, he had a “mental kink”, he wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar disorder until he was 37.
The director revealed: “My parents took me to a psychiatrist when I was 14. A very grand Harley Street office.
“Apparently the things I did and the way I behaved were typical of people from unsettled families. He prescribed me something.
“They recognised that there was a mental kink in me.”
