“Star Wars” scripts and call sheets once owned by Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew will be returned to his widow, Angie Mayhew, instead of auctioned off.
Mayhew, who passed away in 2019, had been forced to leave the “Star Wars” scripts at his old home because “movement challenges” made it “impossible” for him to get into the attic where they were stored, his wife said. Mayhew was 7ft 3in (2.2 m) tall.
It was “one of Peter’s and my biggest regrets that we had to leave these items behind,” Angie Mayhew said.
The couple now living in the house discovered the items and brought them to auctioneer Angus Ashworth in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire.
Ashworth said, “I was approached by a lovely older couple who were clearing their attic a quarter of a century after moving into their property. The contents of the attic included a bag of Star Wars memorabilia, which I thought might be of some interest to Star Wars fans. This wasn’t unusual, film memorabilia comes up for auction all the time and there was some subsequent press interest.”
Angie Mayhew plead on the Twitter page for the Peter Mayhew Foundation that the items not be sold, calling the situation “heart-breaking.”
Ashworth said he was “happy” to return the “Star Wars” scripts and call sheets to Mayhew.
“The first I knew that the Peter Mayhew Foundation wanted to acquire it was following a tweet which garnered a lot of misinformed responses,” he said. “Nobody had approached us to discuss it and had they done so I would of course have talked to the vendors.”
“The monetary value of the lot is fairly modest,” he went on, “but knowing how much it means to the foundation, and given that it had been in the attic for over 24 years, the vendors are quite happy to donate it to the foundation to have permanently within their personal collection, not for profit, so that fans can access it in perpetuity. I can only apologise to all of the Star Wars fans who had already shown great interest in owning a bit of film history.”
Peter Mayhew portrayed Chewbacca in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and for a cameo in “Revenge of the Sith.” He reprised the role in “The Force Awakens” before Joonas Suotamo took it over for the remaining sequels.
Source: BBC
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