A journalist who sat down with Hervé Villechaize for what he believed would be a routine “Where Are They Now?” feature returned to London with 12 hours of raw, harrowing audio—only to receive a phone call a week later informing him the actor was dead. Sacha Gervasi had met the Fantasy Island star at a Los Angeles restaurant in August 1993, expecting a quick, forgettable interview with a washed-up celebrity.
Instead, Villechaize pulled a knife, held it to Gervasi’s throat, and demanded the journalist listen to the real story. Gervasi stayed. He listened for days.
Then, on September 4, 1993, Villechaize shot himself in the backyard of his San Fernando Valley home. The note he left behind cited unbearable physical pain—his internal organs, enlarged by a lifelong endocrine disorder, pressed against his dwarfed frame, leaving him unable to breathe even while sleeping.
Born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943, Villechaize entered a world of war and uncertainty.
His father, a surgeon, and his mother, a socialite turned ambulance driver, fought to give him a normal life, but rumors of adoption—unsubstantiated—dogged his early years. His father, desperate to “cure” his son’s dwarfism, dragged him from specialist to specialist. None could help.
The condition, later diagnosed as an endocrine disorder, left Villechaize in chronic agony. At school, bullies mocked his stature. He found refuge in art: while waiting in American clinics for six months, he drew constantly.
By age 16, his parents sent him to art school. At 17, he became the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the Museum of Paris.
Yet France offered no escape from the stares.
His father told him bluntly: “Go where the freaks go. Go to New York.” Villechaize learned English from television and moved to Manhattan in 1964.
He painted, modeled for National Lampoon, and stumbled into acting. His first film role came in 1966’s Chappaqua. He was cast in an early Dune adaptation, but the project collapsed.
By 1970, he had married fellow artist Anne Sadowski, but the marriage faltered under the weight of his relentless affairs and the cruel comments about their height difference. They divorced nine years later. Professionally, he hit bottom: after stepping away from creative work, he became a rat catcher’s assistant.
Then, evicted, he lived in his car.
Salvation arrived in the form of a phone call: he was cast as Nick Nack, the henchman to Christopher Lee’s villain Francisco Scaramanga in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. The role transformed his life.
His costume required custom gloves costing $10,000. Bond star Roger Moore later wrote in his memoir that Villechaize spent his downtime propositioning women on set, calling him a “creep.” But Lee described Villechaize’s demeanor as joyous—the happiest time of his life.
The actor himself joked about his condition, telling Moore he could only get ground-floor hotel rooms because he couldn’t reach the elevator buttons.
After Bond, Villechaize moved to children’s television: he operated the legs for Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street during its third season. But his defining role came in 1977, when he was cast as Tattoo on ABC’s Fantasy Island.
For seven seasons, he shouted “The plane! The plane!” in his thick French accent, cementing himself in pop culture history.
The show became a massive hit, and Villechaize suddenly earned more money than he could spend. He married Camille Hagen, a stand-in actress, in 1980. They bought a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, filled it with pets and farm animals.
But within a year, Hagen filed for divorce. Behind the scenes, Villechaize had grown furious over his salary—he demanded the same pay as his co-star Ricardo Montalbán. The producers refused.
They fired him after the seventh season. Fantasy Island tried to replace him with actor Christopher Hewett, but ratings collapsed, and the series ended after one more season.
Villechaize spiraled.
In 1985, he was arrested after causing a disturbance at Burbank’s Saint Joseph Medical Center; police found an unlicensed handgun on him. He pleaded no contest and paid a $425 fine. A year later, during a civil suit filed by his ex-wife, he kicked and threatened the process server delivering the papers, leading to another arrest.
He turned to alcohol. His health deteriorated: pneumonia nearly killed him in 1992. The agony of his condition—enlarged organs pressing against his small body—grew unbearable.
He could only sleep kneeling, otherwise he couldn’t breathe.
Desperate for income, he took guest spots: The Larry Sanders Show, a Coors commercial, and a donut shop ad where he reprised “The plane, the plane.” But the pain never stopped.
When Gervasi interviewed him, Villechaize was already planning his exit. Over five days, they met three times. Villechaize detailed everything: his childhood, his failed marriages, his humiliation on set, the daily torment of his body.
Gervasi left with 12 hours of tape. Back in London, he began writing. Then, on September 4, 1993, Villechaize’s girlfriend Kathy Self called: she had heard a loud bang, then another.
She found him in the backyard—he had shot the patio door to wake her, then turned the gun on himself. He was 50 years old.
The suicide note made his motive clear: “I can no longer bear the pain.”
Gervasi, reviewing the recordings, realized a chilling truth: Villechaize had known, during their interviews, that he would be dead within a week. He had forced the journalist to tell his story because he wanted the world to understand the full weight of his suffering, not just the flashy headlines. Gervasi turned the interview into a film script, released in 2018 as My Dinner with Hervé, starring Peter Dinklage as Villechaize.
The actor’s final role had been a cameo as himself on The Ben Stiller Show—a fitting end for a man who spent his entire life playing versions of himself while hiding the agony beneath. His legacy endures not in the catchphrase he made famous, but in the raw, uncomfortable truth he forced one journalist to capture before he was gone.
Villechaize’s story is a cautionary tale of Hollywood’s cruel machinery—a man who rose from the streets of New York to the heights of Fame Island, only to be discarded when he demanded equal pay.
The industry that celebrated his unique talent also mocked him, both on screen and off. His marriages crumbled under the weight of his own demons. His health failed him.
And in the end, he chose the only relief he could find. The journalist who thought he was writing a simple “Where Are They Now?” piece instead became the keeper of a deathbed confession.
Every word Villechaize spoke in those final days was a plea: remember me not as a joke, but as a man who suffered, fought, and lost. That is the story Gervasi carried home. That is the story that deserves to be told.
