"My swan song." The British actor was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease - now he will play in Beckett's monodrama
Author, Jim Reed
Place of work, BBC
Published August 31, 2026
For four days in a row, Peter Marinker came to rehearsals, which were not there that day. Due to dementia, the rehearsal dates were all mixed up in his head.
Yet he is now preparing for what most actors would consider an impossible task, even with perfect memory: performing a beloved Samuel Beckett play on the London stage.
Marinker, 85, is best known for his voice-over work, from radio dramas and video games to big-budget films such as "Labyrinth" and "Paddington in Peru."
On screen, he played an advisor to the US President in the film Love Actually and one of the plane passengers in the drama Flight 93.
In 2023, he played Gandalf in the stage version of The Lord of the Rings, but at one point he felt like he was "switching off" and an understudy had to replace him for the rest of the season.
This was followed by an MRI and other medical tests. And two years ago he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
“I just had to come to terms with it,” he says. “That explained why I kept losing things—and then I started laughing at myself, at all these stupid things I do over and over again.”
In such a situation, other actors might no longer agree to perform in front of a live audience.
But Marinker received an unexpected call from a man with whom he had worked closely in the past: Dave Whybrow, director of London's Cockpit Theatre.
The idea was to stage Krapp's Last Tape, a tense monodrama in which an aging writer listens to tapes of his younger self, recalling a life of regret and missed opportunities.
“It’s a stunning performance and a stunning piece of writing,” says Whybrow, whose mother also suffered from memory loss late in life.
Rehearsals have been going on since the end of June to give Marinker additional time to prepare. A whole team gathered to implement this project.
During all performances, a stage director will stand next to the set, screens with a teleprompter will be placed throughout the theater, and Marinker will have a small earpiece so that he can quickly be prompted with lines if he forgets his lines.
Whybrow insists this is not about hiding Marinker's disease, but about showing that creative collaboration is still more than possible even with a dementia diagnosis.
Marinker says he had no concerns from day one.
"Dave asked if I wanted to do it and I just said, 'Yes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!'" he says. “I’ll still be nervous [on opening night], but I know how to deal with it—it’s just adrenaline.”
Echo of the past
This is not the first time Marinker has performed in this play. He first performed the same role in 1983.
The creative team discovered reel-to-reel recordings of that performance more than 40 years ago, and they will be woven into the new production, where his character listens again and again to the voice that belonged to him in his youth.
One of the characteristics of Alzheimer's disease is that memory loss can be selective rather than uniform.
In the early stages of the disease, the areas around the hippocampus, located deep in the temporal lobes of the brain, are among the first to be affected.
This region plays a key role in the formation and retrieval of what scientists call episodic memories: memories of specific events and experiences in a person's life.
This is why people with Alzheimer's disease, for example, may have difficulty remembering a family vacation, a conversation with a friend, or someone's name.
However, other memories associated with well-practiced skills and everyday activities may be more durable.
“Information stored in long-term consolidated memory is often easier to access than new memories that have just been formed,” says Tara Spiers-Jones, professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh and author of Fighting for Our Minds.
This helps explain why some people with Alzheimer's disease can still make a cup of tea, remember the words to a song, or even perform a piece of music or a well-rehearsed piece of theater - even when other memories may have begun to fade.
Fighting stigma
All profits from the four-day theatrical performances will benefit the Alzheimer's Society, the organization that helped Peter after his diagnosis.
