Rick Elice & Roger Rees

Rick Elice and Roger Rees
1982 - 2015
Rick Elice and Roger Rees  
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Rick Elice and Roger Rees were married for 3 years before Roger Rees died aged 71.

About

Rick Elice is a 67 year old American Playwright born on 17th November, 1956 in New York City, New York, USA. His zodiac sign is Scorpio

Welsh Actor Roger Rees was born on 5th May, 1944 in Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire, Wales and passed away on 10th Jul 2015 Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA aged 71. He is most remembered for Star 80, Cheers. His zodiac sign is Taurus.

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References

Relationship Statistics

StatusDurationLength
Dating1982 - Aug 2011 29 years, 7 months
MarriedAug 2011 - 10th Jul 2015 3 years, 11 months
Total 1982 - 10th Jul 2015 33 years, 6 months


For sixteen years, the actor Roger Rees and the playwright Rick Elice have lived in a book-crammed apartment in the Beresford, on Central Park West. Elice (New Yorker, garrulous) is the author of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” a fanciful prequel to “Peter Pan,” which has been nominated for nine Tony Awards. Rees (Welshman, genteel) co-directed, with Alex Timbers. (Elice also co-wrote, with Marshall Brickman, the books for “Jersey Boys” and “The Addams Family,” in which Rees starred, as Gomez.) To understand how Rees and Elice became partners, in art and in life, you have to go back a ways, they explained the other day, as a hired computer geek fiddled upstairs, trying to synch the couple’s electronic devices.
1979: Elice, a young actor out of the Yale School of Drama, wrote a letter to Trevor Nunn, then the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, saying, “I’m getting on a plane and I’m coming over to the R.S.C. Tell me what time to show up.” Two weeks later, Nunn replied: Not hiring Americans.
1981: Nunn’s mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” came to New York. Elice was incensed: “I went to Equity and said, ‘I would like to start a committee to keep British actors out of Broadway.’ ” (“British Out of Broadway would be BOOB,” Rees added.) Elice went to see the play anyway. From the nosebleeds, he noticed a “devastatingly beautiful” actor milling around before the show. Turns out it was the guy playing Nicholas Nickleby. Enraptured, Elice wrote a letter that night on yellow legal paper, inviting Rees to come see him do a tap number at a benefit. He dropped it off at the theatre the next day. No response.
1982: Elice was working at an ad agency, and one of his clients was “Cats,” also directed by Nunn. At the dress rehearsal, he spotted Rees in the audience. He waited outside the stage door to introduce himself. “Standing before me was a six-foot-four, extraordinarily handsome American in a Burberry raincoat,” Rees recalled. “It was the raincoat that did it.” Rees was flying to London in two days, to star in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.” Did he have time for dinner before then?
The next night, Elice prepared pigeon en croûte at his apartment, on West Fifty-seventh Street (Rees: “The croûte was bigger than the apartment”). They talked until three in the morning, then Rees got in a car to J.F.K. He told Elice, “Maybe you’ll come over and see me in ‘The Real Thing.’ ”
1987ish: They’d been dating long-distance, with Elice flying to London on weekends. One day, while they were repainting Rees’s foyer, Elice moved a filing cabinet and found some papers labelled “Rick’s Correspondence.” One of the letters was written on yellow legal paper.
1989: Rees was in Los Angeles, doing another Stoppard play, when he was offered a recurring role on “Cheers,” as Kirstie Alley’s rich suitor. He sold his house in London and moved to L.A. “So, once again, we were three thousand miles apart,” Rees said.
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1995: Rees relocated, finally, to New York. There was a vacant apartment in the Beresford. “Unbeknownst to us, it had been on the market for a year and a half,” Elice said. “The woman who owned it had instructed her broker, ‘Whoever the next person is, just sell them the fucking apartment.’ ”
1999: Elice was still working at the ad agency, but the deadlines were gruelling. “I was having more sleepless nights,” he recalled. “I was getting fatter. I suddenly needed to see a therapist.” Rees colluded with a pal at Disney to get Elice a job as a “creative consultant.” “They saved me,” Elice said. “And it’s only because I left advertising that I was able to take advantage of an opportunity like somebody saying, ‘I have the option on the Four Seasons catalogue. Are you interested in writing a musical about them?’ ”
2011: On June 24th, the New York State Senate voted to legalize gay marriage. Elice: “Roger came home from ‘The Addams Family’ that night and said, ‘Do you want to get married?’ I said, ‘I don’t know—it seems like a big step!’ ”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“The next day, I was walking by the dog park over by the Planetarium, and I realized I had pissed on this very sweet moment. So when he came home that night I said, ‘Yeah, by all means, let’s do this.’ ” August: they got married at the City Clerk’s Office. Afterward: pancakes at Bubby’s.
2012: “Peter and the Starcatcher” opens on Broadway. “There’s a scene that the girl hero, Molly, has with the boy,” Elice said. “Roger wanted a scene where the two of them sort of fall in love. When it came to writing it, I cast Roger in the role of the wiser character. She says, ‘I will love words,’ which Roger taught me to do. Then she says, ‘I’m going to be part of a different sort of family.’ ” Synched. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/06/04/120604ta_talk_schulman#ixzz25hcNcI2Q

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Relationship Timeline

August, 2011 - Marriage

2005 - Breakup

1982 - Hookup

Couple Comparison

Name
Rick Elice
Roger Rees
Rick Elice
Roger Rees
Age (at start of relationship)
25
37
Zodiac
Scorpio
Taurus
Occupation
Playwright
Actor
Nationality
American
Welsh
Religion
Jewish
Jewish

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