Apart from the fact that he's dead, it's looking like a good year for Hervé Villechaize, the diminutive actor known for his role in the movie, The Man With the Golden Gun, his role in the TV series, Fantasy Island, and just about nothing else. He is the unlikely subject of an HBO movie, My Dinner With Hervé, which debuts October 20 and which stars Peter Dinklage. Would this film even have been made if we didn't have a major star who was roughly the proper height?
This is another one of those "someone famous playing someone famous" movies which as I mentioned here, usually don't work for me. I worked with Hervé once. It's a story I told when I appeared earlier this year on Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. In fact, it was the second thing Gilbert asked me about. I don't feel like telling the story again here right now but if you subscribe to Stitcher Premium, you can hear it there. If you don't subscribe to Stitcher Premium, you should have listened to it back before it disappeared behind their paywall.
Anyway, here's how I intend to judge Peter Dinklage's performance: If I can understand more than about 25% of what he says, I will feel he has not captured the true Hervé.
I have conflicted feelings about Mr. Villechaize. His life had a very sad ending when his career got ice-cold. On the other hand, it's kind of amazing that he ever had any sort of career at all.
Please don't think I'm trying to ridicule him or mock his later years because I'm not. But in show business, there just aren't a lot of job openings for a 3'11" man with a thick French accent and not a lot of acting ability. Imagine you were living in your car, as he was at one point, and you knew that there was almost no chance of any sort of stardom, fame or riches in your future. Then The Devil or a C.A.A. agent appeared and told you you could have all that. You'd probably be wise enough to ask, "What's the catch?" and he'd tell you it was only for ten years and then it will all go away forever.
Would you take that deal? A lot of people would with zero hesitation. A lot of them would think that as sad as the post-stardom period might be, it would still be preferable to no stardom period at all. I'd like to think Hervé thought it that way but he probably didn't.
Anyway, I want to give him an additional credit here. As you may know, he started out as a painter and had a fair amount of success in France. I'll let Wikipedia pick up the story…
In 1964 he left France for the United States. He settled in a Bohemian section of New York City, taught himself English by watching television. Villechaize initially worked as an artist, painter and photographer. He began acting in Off Broadway productions, including The Young Master Dante by Werner Liepolt and a play by Sam Shepard, and he also modeled for photos for National Lampoon before moving on to film.
During that artist period, he somehow made contact with an artist named Jacqueline Roettcher. When I met Jacqueline, she was working quite successfully in animation in Los Angeles while also continuing a long career as an inker of comic books, mainly for the Harvey company. She inked many of their books but mainly the Casper and Richie Rich titles, particularly the ones penciled by Warren Kremer. She told me she'd often hire assistants to help her out and one of the assistants she had for a few years was Hervé Villechaize.
This was back when Hervé was still able to grip a pen or brush. As I mentioned on Mr. Gottfried's podcast, by the time I worked with him, some complication of his physical condition had made it impossible for him to use his hands for much more than gesturing. On our show when he had a costume change, he was unable to zip up his own fly. That show was in 1985. Mark Arnold, who is the world's foremost authority on Harvey Comics, estimates that Hervé worked on the comics between 1971 and 1973. (The Casper cover I selected above is from that period and it almost certainly has inking by Jacqueline Roettcher somewhere in it. We have no way of knowing if Hervé assisted on anything in that issue but he could have.)
I suppose he'd be happy to know he has not been forgotten and that people are still talking about him. Just in case he'd be annoyed that they don't know he once worked on Richie Rich, I thought I oughta put that information on the Internet. Spread it around…for Hervé.