Optimistic Connolly carries on
Billy Connolly says he’s the most optimistic man you’ll ever meet.
It’s partly why he’s not bothered by the fact that, in his new film What We Did On Our Holiday, he dies. In fact, Connolly jokes that, nowadays, he dies in almost every film he’s in.
“My kids are getting sick of it,” he laughs over the phone from his home in Gozo, an island on the Mediterranean Sea. “I love it. I’m getting quite good at dying. I’ve died in all sorts of ways. I was recently killed by a spear by a charging lancer. I got to make all sorts of weird noises.”
In What We Did On Our Holiday, Connolly plays the terminally ill Gordie — his character has cancer, and is resigned more to the idea of dying than to living out his final days on medication. In life, Connolly is matter- of- fact about death, but in a way that’s more cheerful than morbid.
“I don’t give it a second thought,” he says. “It’s just a question of where. I really don’t care. I’ve refused to give it a second thought, to give it any importance.”
Connolly’s optimism and frankness in the face of mortality may have helped him get into character as Gordie, and has also served as a cushion in real life: Connolly was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer on the same day in 2013 ( the cancer was successfully operated on).
“You don’t want to be defined by your illness,” he says of coping with Parkinson’s. “Not only does it define you, but it dictates what people talk to you about. I think the weight that it carries is entirely up to you. The first thing to do is get away from the Internet. Carry your burden as well as you can and get on with it.”
Part of getting on with it for Connolly hasn’t just meant staying on
I’m getting quite good at dying. I’ve died in all sorts of ways. I was recently killed by a spear by a charging lancer.
the big screen — in addition to Holiday, he recently appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies ( that’s where the lancing incident took place) and participated in the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? in which he discovered that his lineage can be, in part, traced back to India. He’s also hitting the road: Connolly will embark on a standup tour of Canada in late 2015 and early 2016. But he, typically, underplays the whole thing.
“I’m just going to work,” he says. “You can only go fishing and draw pictures for so much of your life. I think my family” — wife Pamela Stephenson and three children — “is glad to see the back of me, you know. When I’m at home too long, I get jumpy. I’ve spent my whole life on the road.”
Another part of coping was speaking to friend Robin Williams, who had himself been diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly before his death last year. The two were close friends, having met backstage ahead of a talk- show appearance years ago.
Connolly says he didn’t have any sense that Williams’ sadness was so deep as to drive him to take his own life.
“It takes my breath away,” he says.
“Then again, suicide always does. You feel abandoned and unconsulted. It’s unfair. And he’d never done an unfair thing as long as I’d known him. I don’t profess to understand. I know I loved him, and he loved me.”