Matthew Perry, the comic genius who wore his big, bruised heart on his sleeve

When Matthew Perry was a teenager in Ottawa, Canada, he developed a dryly sarcastic manner of talking that was a big hit with his friends. Ten years later, reading the early scripts for Friends, a series about a group of twentysomething New Yorkers who lived in and out of each other’s apartments, Perry found a kindred spirit in the character of Chandler Bing, who used humour to send up his own insecurities and whose sarcastic one-liners – “Could she be more out of my league?” – would become his trademark. That’s the guy.’” Friends would turn Perry – who died at his home yesterday at the age of 54 – into one of the most famous comic actors in the world. “And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.” Published last year, Perry’s variously funny, candid and sad memoir was less the story of a glittering showbiz career and a gilded life than a tale of the epic struggle of a lifelong addict to keep the show on the road. A tired-looking Perry was last on set, prompting Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, to exclaim, “Could you be any later?” Throughout the show, Perry was visibly emotional, and confessed that, while filming Friends in front of a studio audience, “I felt like I would die if I didn’t get a laugh – I’d sweat, have convulsions.” It’s little wonder that the runaway success of Friends – the final episode, which aired on 6 May 2004, was watched by 52.5 million viewers in America, making it the most-watched TV episode of the decade – would become a millstone for the actor, who spent subsequent decades trying, and inevitably failing, to match it through other projects.