Ringo Starr performing in Paris with The Beatles - 1965

Credit: Bent Rej

The two times Ringo Starr narrowly avoided death

Mon 30 October 2023 14:00, UK

Imagine a world without any of The Beatles’ later work. Imagine there’s no Abbey Road, no Sgt. Pepper. Imagine if all the music post-Help didn’t exist. Well, history could’ve turned out very differently if Ringo Starr hadn’t been quite so lucky in one of his two brushes with death.

So dedicated to the band, it seems there was nothing Ringo Starr wouldn’t do for The Beatles, including putting his life on the line. In his time in the band, the Liverpudlian drummer narrowly avoided death not once but twice. The first time, Starr almost met a grizzly end, ensuring that the band got the perfect shot for their 1964 film Help.

The star of the show in the movie, Help tells the story of Ringo Starr being given an enchanted ring by a fan that is a key piece of a ritual sacrifice. The band then get into all kinds of hijinks and shenanigans as the owners try to get the ring back.

One adventure sees Ringo Starr diving off a boat and into the ocean. The co-star in the movie, Victor Spinetti, reveals the danger Starr put himself in for the sake of Help.

Talking to WalesOnline, Spinette recalls filming the scene where Starr “dives off but quickly comes straight back out shivering because it was freezing and there were shark nets everywhere – it was actually very dangerous”.

Forced to repeat the stunt as “something went wrong, and they had to [do the] shot again, so in he dived once more”, Spinetti continues. “The third time he was being dried off with a hairdryer, and he said: ‘Oh, Victor, I don’t want to do this again.’ I asked why, and he replied, ‘Because I can’t bloody swim.’ Can you believe that? He could have drowned there and then. So I waved my arms and shouted to the film crew, ‘He can’t swim!’”

Facing up to sharks and the risk of drowning, Ringo Starr’s dedication to the movie was unrivalled. When Spinetti asked him why he was doing the stunt if he couldn’t swim, Starr replied simply, “‘Well, when the director says, ‘Action,’ you’ve got to do it, haven’t you?’”

But that wasn’t the only time Ringo Starr nearly died during his time in The Beatles. Out of the water and away from the cameras, Starr’s reckless driving also saw him have a brush with death.

In fact, this incident even led to John Lennon surrendering to being a passenger rather than driving himself, despite having a sizable collection of cars. When The Beatles first made it big, Lennon took to buying sports cars and encouraging his bandmates to race him, but the levels of recklessness they reached terrified them all.

The story goes that while visiting their friend Pete Shotton Hayling Island, The Beatles had one of their infamous races with John Lennon bringing his Ferrari on the trip, thinking the small island made a perfect race track.

Talking about the race, Shotton described it as the “most hair-raising drive of my life (indeed, I’m still surprised that it didn’t prove to be the last drive of my life!)”

Writing in his book The Beatles, Lennon and Me, Shotton continues: “Only a few miles out of Hayling Island, as we screamed onto the Portsmouth-London road, a man in a white E-type Jaguar saw what we were up to, and joined in our little game. For the next forty-five miles, each of us deliberately strove to outdo the others in sheer recklessness.”

To Lennon, the thrill of winning these races was the “most fantastic kick”, but that joy wore off when bandmate Ringo Starr nearly got in an accident while they were racing.

“Their enthusiasm for amateur drag racing was to be abruptly dispelled when Ringo,” Shotton writes. “Hurtling along in his Facel Viga at one-hundred and fifty miles per hour, managed barely to avoid slamming directly into the back of a car that had suddenly switched into his lane at a mere seventy miles per hour”.

“Though nobody was seriously hurt, both Ringo and John were deeply shaken by the experience, and John, at least, seemed content to let others do his driving for him from that point on.”

Thankfully, Ringo Starr survived the ’60s, and the band went on to make some of the most defining albums in history.