Spartacus star left alleged lover to die 'penniless and bitter' despite Olympic success

A British skating champion sadly died almost penniless - despite his alleged affair with a high-profile Hollywood actor.

On a freezing February evening in 1976, Britain came to a standstill. Twenty million people tuned into the Winter Olympics, suddenly captivated by a sport most had barely thought about before. Out on the rink in Innsbruck, Austria, a 26-year-old skater from Birmingham dazzled the world. His name was John Curry - and with a single gold-medal performance he transformed ice skating forever.

Handsome, and blending athletic power with balletic grace, Curry redefined the discipline into something closer to art. "I feel so inspired I could explode," he told a friend before that competition. That night, his perfection stunned judges, thrilled audiences, and made him a household name. Yet behind the triumphant image of Britain's golden boy lay a story marked by trauma, secrecy and loneliness.

Curry's story began in an affluent suburb of Birmingham. Despite his later insistence that he was "a working-class boy from an ordinary home," the Currys lived in a six-bedroom Edwardian house with stained-glass windows and sprawling grounds.

From the moment he could walk, John wanted to dance. A former au pair remembered him "skipping constantly from room to room or waltzing silently through the house."

But his father Joseph, a hard-drinking factory owner, forbade it. Ballet, he said, was no career for a boy. Ice skating, however, was permitted. Rita, his devoted mother, drove him to endless lessons before and after school.

By the time Curry was 16, tragedy reshaped his life. His father was found dead in a Paddington hotel, having taken his own life. "We were delighted, we were happy, we were free of him," John later confided to a friend. The repression that had held him back disappeared overnight.

He threw himself into skating - and at last, ballet. He also fell in love for the first time, with a Swiss skating coach named Heinz Wirz. Letters from that period reveal a young man vulnerable and yearning. "When you come back to England, I want to marry you," he wrote in 1969, barely a year after homosexuality was legalised in Britain. "Some boys do get married, you know... Please don't think I'm crazy."

The notes swing from elation to self-loathing. "Do you think it is because I am ugly or something?" he asked in one.

By the early 1970s, Curry was unstoppable. He became British champion in 1970, secured a wealthy American sponsor, and won the European title in 1976. His Olympic gold in Innsbruck was the highlight.

Royalty, ministers, celebrities and would-be suitors flooded him with telegrams. But within 48 hours, his euphoria was crushed. In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Curry spoke candidly about his sexuality, believing it off the record. Instead, he became the first major British sportsman to be publicly outed.

The reaction was swift and cruel. At the Sports Journalists' Association Christmas bash that year, a comedian introduced him as "the fairy for the tree." Curry collected his award in silence, his face stricken. "It was one of the most hurtful incidents of my life," he admitted later.

His Theatre of Skating, set up in the wake of his Olympic triumph, also faltered. Critics derided it as "ballet in big boots." Friends noticed his temper growing darker. "He was corrupted by rage," one recalled. By 1977, the dream was over, and Curry abandoned Britain for New York.

While Curry was retreating from the spotlight, Alan Bates was at the height of his own career. Born in Derbyshire, Bates had decided at the age of 11 to become an actor. After training at RADA and serving in the RAF, he joined the English Stage Company and burst to fame in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.

By the 1960s he was one of Britain's most magnetic screen presences, working with directors like Harold Pinter and Peter Shaffer. He starred in The Entertainer with Laurence Olivier, earned an Oscar nomination for The Fixer in 1968, and became a household name with the notorious nude wrestling scene opposite Oliver Reed in Women in Love.

Bates married actress Victoria Ward in 1970, and the couple had twin sons. But privately he was rumoured to keep relationships with other people, including, allegedly, John Curry. For nearly two decades, they allegedly shared a discreet, shifting bond - never acknowledged publicly, and never documented in letters.

Tragedy hit Bates hard in the 1990s: his son Tristan died of an asthma attack, and his wife soon after. Bates himself was knighted in 2003 but succumbed to pancreatic cancer later that year.

For Curry, the years after his Olympic win grew increasingly fraught. According to Wirz, he developed what he described as a "dangerous appetite" for extreme sexual encounters. He was badly beaten on Earls Court Road in London during one such liaison, injuries from which haunted him for years.

Far worse arrived in the mid-1980s. As the AIDS epidemic tore through New York, Curry's friends and lovers died one by one. In 1987, he himself tested positive.

By 1991 he returned to Britain, broken in health and spirit, to live quietly with his mother in a village near Coventry. Rita never discussed his illness with him - to her, it remained "the disease without a name."

Those who visited in his final weeks found a man wasted away but still beautiful. "His face was all eyes," recalled dancer Gillian Lynne. Too weak to lift a cup of coffee without trembling, he still spoke about choosing a new lamp for his room.

On April 14, 1994, John Curry died at just 44. He left only £6,000 in his will. Alan Bates, who visited to say goodbye, never spoke of their relationship.

Only a year before his death, Curry told Bates during a holiday in Cornwall: "I never wanted a long life, to grow old. What mattered to me was a life lived well. I just hope I have done something with it."