Richard Curtis opens up about sister’s suicide

RICHARD CURTIS has revealed his sister committed suicide following a 25-year battle with psychological illness, as he said society was “failing” to focus properly on mental health.

The screenwriter behind Love Actually and Notting Hill said his sister took her own life the day before a planned party for her.

The relative is believed to be Belinda Curtis, one of the screenwriter’s two older sisters, who died in Sydney around the time of her 55th birthday in 2009.

“We had a 25-year stab at trying to help my sister and couldn’t do it,” Curtis told the Public Health England annual conference.

Speaking publicly about the tragedy for the first time, the 61-year-old creator of Blackadder said: “I so don’t believe in thinking about what you could have done.

“But the circumstances of my sister’s suicide could not have been jollier as it were. They had shopped for her birthday party the next day, couldn’t have done anything more right, and yet that was still the day she chose to take her own life.”

He added: “My daughter is partly hit by it [mental illness] because she had an operation that went wrong and spent four years in her bedroom screaming.”

He also revealed that the designer of a movie he is working on took his own life on Tuesday.