How John Lennon was made into a myth

How John Lennon was made into a myth Getty Images Forty years ago today, the Beatles star was assassinated – and has since held a god-like status around the world. Alamy Lennon admitted to hitting women, including his first wife Cynthia, in an interview published two days before his death "Can you imagine John operating a boat by himself?" Snodgrass starred Liverpudlian actor Ian Hart as Lennon – the third time he had played him, following on from 1994 feature film Backbeat, which charted the band’s early days and focused on the relationship between Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, the band's original bassist, who left the nascent band to pursue his passion for art, and died tragically young in 1962, aged just 21, of a brain haemorrhage. Alamy The 1994 film Backbeat focused on the relationship between John Lennon and ‘fifth Beatle’ Stuart Sutcliffe In this case, it explored what might have happened when Lennon and the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein spent a weekend in Barcelona in 1963, and presented the episode as a story of tender yet forbidden love between the two.