Ralf Little opens up on how his sister’s death turned him ‘psychotic’
Ralf Little confessed that he’d fabricated a false memory of seeing his sister fall to her death, although he wasn’t there at the time, and that it had haunted him. The Death in Paradise star added that he’d become “fiercely competitive” and “psychotic” in a bid to ward off the pain.
His much-loved sister Ceri had been just 14 when she and younger brother Ralf, then nine, went on a Cornish camping trip with their grandparents.
However, due to the harrowing accident, Ceri never returned home.
Ralf’s parents made a frantic “10-hour-long drive” to her hospital bed, but by the time they arrived, Ralf’s grandfather had already decided to have her life support machine turned off.
Speaking of how witnessing her death had affected him, he agonised: “My way of rebelling against the hand I’d been dealt was to excel at everything, which is vaguely psychotic.”
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He added to The Times of his sudden high-achieving streak: “My grades were straight As, I was on every school team. I’m still fiercely competitive, sometimes problematically competitive.”
The TV star explained his perfectionism as a way to help him regain control and recover from a time when he hadn’t been able to exert any.
“You think: ‘I can’t do anything about death, so what shall I do instead?'” he explained.
His attitude meant that by the time he finished school, there was no shortage of career choices on offer to him.
Yet behind the scenes of his incredible success lay private heartbreak.
Ralf recalled that his mother always blamed her parents for Ceri’s fall, as she’d been in their care that day, and said that their fractured relationship was never the same again.
Meanwhile, he agonised in an interview with The Guardian: “I have a memory of seeing [my sister] fall, but a couple of years ago I discovered that I couldn’t possibly have seen it as we had headed back to the beach, so my brain fabricated a traumatic memory.”
He felt that his parents stayed together for the benefit of himself, his younger brother Ross and his older sister Rowena – and he’s not convinced that was the right decision.
“Bless ’em, I wish for them they’d split up about six years previously because every time they looked at each other they were just heartbroken,” he recalled.
Ralf never had therapy to confront his feelings, and he subsequently realised the moment had left him “filled with rage”.
He told Radio 4: “I could have gone to school and just had this massive meltdown, rebelling, and being angry.
“But I channelled that rage into getting all of life and giving it a kicking!”
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