Royals ‘vetoed TV star’s gong’

DESPITE being one of Wales’s most celebrated actors, Olivier Awardwinning Roger Rees, who died in 2015 aged 71, was never given a knighthood.

Now, his husband, the playwright Rick Elice, has claimed the omission was because he upset the Royals. He says Rees, who starred in Cheers and The West Wing, made ‘the knighthood-killing choice’ to play Prince Charles in a TV mini-series, Unhappily Ever After.

‘It wasn’t very good,’ admits Elice in his forthcoming memoir, Finding Roger: An Improbably Theatrical Love Story.

‘And the Royal Family does not forgive bad television. Except, on occasion, their own.’