Favourite friend seemed so alone

MATTHEW PERRY: STAR'S LIFELONG BATTLE WITH DEMONS

Matthew Perry dying at 54 is shocking, but not surprising - a contradiction in terms, which he has always been.

He was absolutely beloved, globally, by millions, but described himself as "broken, bent, unlovable".

He was everyone's favourite Friend, but always seemed so alone.

On the surface, he had it all, but none of it made any difference.

Matthew will be forever remembered as Miss Chanandler Bong, a sentence that will be unbearably poignant to most reading it, and utterly mystifying to the three people in the world who don't know every episode of Friends off by heart.

The news that we had lost him made many of us gasp, but also had an air of heartbreaking inevitability to it. After all, Matthew had been incredibly open about his decades-long battle with addiction in a bid to help others, honestly recounting all the times he had nearly met his maker.

In the opening to his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, he wrote: "Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead." Matthew was born on August 19, 1969, in Massachusetts, but grew up in Ottawa, Ontario.

An only child, he was raised by mum Suzanne, a writer and former press aide for Prime Minister Pierre. Trudeau, after his parents divorced when he was just one.

His mother remarried and went on to have the four step-siblings he was brought up alongside.

Matthew's father, John Bennett Perry, was an actor who appeared on American soap Falcon Crest.

He inspired his son to follow in his footsteps, backed up by Matthew's experiences at school. "I'd fall down. I'd tell jokes. I liked the feedback, he recalled. "I loved making girls laugh. It felt good. When I was, like, 15, I realised there could be a career in making people laugh - like, you could get paid to do it. That was insane to me.