Tony Palmieri/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock
McQueen(now playing in select theaters)unveils a “softer side” of the designer, co-director and writer Peter Ettedgui tells PEOPLE, through home video footage and intimate interviews with family and friends. It also highlights the internal struggles that affected McQueen personally and professionally.
When Janet found out he had been abused years after the fact she said, “I was shell-shocked,” Janet told the U.K.’sTimesin 2015. “You just can’t grasp it at first. Of course I felt guilt. Who wouldn’t?”
For more on Alexander McQueen’s life and legacy pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.
His marriage to George Forsyth (the two wed in an unofficial wedding ceremony in Ibiza in 2000) ended within two years. He also underwent liposuction and abused drugs and alcohol. “Fame, money and drugs can be a lethal combination. And unfortunately for Lee, it was,” his former roommate and hairstylist Mira Chai-Hyde tells PEOPLE.
After the death of his friend and mentor Isabella Blow in 2007, Gary describes McQueen has being “very much out of it a lot of the time.”
According to the documentary, McQueen was HIV-positive when he died which Gary thinks was “always in the back of Lee’s mind.”
At his final fashion show in 2009, his former assistant Sebastian Pons says in the film that McQueen contemplated killing himself at the end of the show. “Everything in his life just led to these feelings of torment,” says Pons. “He said ‘Yeah, I’m fed up, I’m done with this, I just want this to end.’ He thought the whole fashion world was against him.”
What eventually sent McQueen into a deeper depression was the death of his mother Joyce on February 2, 2010. The two were very close and she sat front row at many of his fashion shows. “She was incredibly proud of him,” says Chai-Hyde.
McQueen died one day before Joyce’s funeral. On the day before taking his own life, he passed along the design plans of her gravestone to Gary. “Funny enough, he was in really good spirits and he seemed like he was actually getting better,” says Gary. “I thought that maybe he was going to be OK. But who knows. You just wonder.”
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
source: people.com
