The life of R D Laing, the celebrity psychiatrist, is to be made into a film. Laing, who was born in Scotland but based himself in London during his 1960s and 70s heyday, was considered to be Britain's answer to the US psychedelic guru Timothy Leary and at the height of his fame attracted the support of the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. However, by the time of his death from a heart attack in 1989, many of his progressive theories had been discredited.
Robert Carlyle, star of The Full Monty and Trainspotting, is said to be in talks to play Laing (pictured). Brought up in the type of environment Laing endorsed, a hippie commune, the actor is a long-time admirer of the shrink's ideas, which involved searching for the roots of mental illness in the stresses within the family and other close relationships.
Much of the movie will be centred on Laing's work at Kingsley Hall in east London, where he devoted himself to a radical experiment in which mentally ill patients and their doctors lived together. However, it seems likely that the film will also focus on some of his more famous patients.
Among these were the young Sean Connery, who at the time was struggling to come to terms with his new-found stardom after appearing as James Bond in the movie Goldfinger. Connery's first wife Diane Cilento recalled how the actor was persuaded by Laing to take the powerful and at that time legal hallucinogenic LSD to unleash the anxieties left from his strict working-class upbringing in Edinburgh.
Taking a smaller dose of the drug, Laing accompanied Connery on the psychedelic trip. Cilento later described how the meeting came about. "[Laing] demanded a great deal of money, complete privacy, a limo to transport him to and from the meeting and a bottle of the best single malt scotch at each session," she said.
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