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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Amelia Hill

UK arts groups offer therapeutic support to performers as they challenge myth of tortured artist

Prisoner in a cell on stage looking tortured
Michael Mayes in Dead Man Walking: ENO provided mental health support during and after the production. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

From Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf, from Nina Simone to Amy Winehouse, the tortured-artist archetype looms large: private torment fuelling public brilliance.

But across opera, theatre, film and television, a growing movement is pushing back against what many now insist is a corrosive myth – the romanticised necessity of creative martyrdom.

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