"Jeremy, although I scarcely appreciated it at the time, was having trouble. He was far too young for his leading lady and was about to be sacked. He always says that he was moved and touched when I appeared because I had this vulnerable, slightly stooped appearance, and I was both benign and gentle, which is true. I was also overweight, because the landlady at Preston had fed us all very well."
"Jeremy snuggled up to me and to Tarn. We became inseparable best friends. He was terribly good-looking and always suffered for it. At school he was known as 'the tart of Eton' because he sang like Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, but was giving out all the wrong signals to unsuitable men who kept trying to pick him up. And I was the gentleman's relish who sat between him and the rather heavy old queers in the company. I winkled him out and we bonded-as platonic friends, never sexual partners. We balanced up the classes between us."
"I moved in with Jeremy Brett over the Astoria Ballroom. The lettering used to light up at night[...] Jeremy had two rooms over the last 'A'. [...] There were fights downstairs in the ballroom every weekend. Not between me and Jeremy, who was and remains my dearest friend. Neither of us would go down when these terrible fights were going on, in case we were trampled to death. It wasn't a very glamorous life, but we were always screaming with laughter. We went regularly to the pub, of course and every Friday night we'd treat ourselves to a strong hot curry."
"In June 1955, Jeremy went off to make the King Vidor film of War and Peace, with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. I found a letter of farewell from the book and gave it to him to read on the plane. He told me how touched he was and very kindly said to Tarn and I that, if we could find our fares in the next three weeks break, he would pay all our expenses. So we went to Rome, a city which I have adored unreservedly from that day to this, and we were billeted in a flat with Robert Graves' daughter, Diana. Jeremy, bless his heart, gave us pocket money from his own salary."
On the occasion of a disastrous birthday celebration and the beginning of the decline in his marriage to Maggie Smith:
"I booked a table on the patio in the Meridiana [...] It was absolutely freezing cold. the waiters were not at their best. The food was not hot. Jeremy at one point popped over the road to Queen Elm's Square to bring a pile of old sweaters for everyone[...] We all went back to the house to warm ourselves up and drink some more. Jeremy put on his own record of The Merry Widow and was kind enough to start singing along with himself. Maggie was very cross indeed... "
During a very difficult time in his life:
"The only really constant friends I had through all this were Christopher Downes, whom Maggie liked very much and Jeremy Brett, whom Maggie did not like at all [...] Jeremy took me to the nursing home, where they wouldn't accept me at first because I was drunk. I was so desperate I had found a bottle of vodka in Jeremy's flat where I had stayed the night before, and swallowed most of it. But eventually they took me in [...] Two nights later I skipped out and went to find Jeremy at his theatre [...] At this point Jeremy took me home and looked after me.People often assume that we must have been lovers, but our friendship, forged in those early days in Manchester went far deeper than that."
"I have never been professionally jealous of anyone, not Brando, not Larry(Olivier), not Robert de Niro . Except once: of Jeremy Brett. Jeremy is my oldest pal, and when he played Danilo in The Merry Widow on television with Mary Costa, the opera singer, he looked fantastic and he sang beautifully - after a three month crash course - he drove me crazy with jealousy.”