In the film “Dead Ringers,” Beverly and Elliot Mantle, two gynecologists, are described as having an unhealthy preoccupation with one another and their patients. In her TV version, which premieres on Prime Video on April 21, Rachel Weisz portrays both Beverly and Elliot.
The original “Dead Ringers,” directed by David Cronenberg in 1988, has Jeremy Irons as the lead identical twin doctors. The book “Twins” by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, published in 1977, served as the basis for that movie.
The calmer, more reserved twin, Beverly, falls in love with a patient in both the TV and movie adaptations of “Dead Ringers,” which makes Elliot incredibly envious and causes him (or her, depending on which “Dead Ringers” you’re seeing or reading) to wreck havoc on the family.
In 1975, identical twin doctors named Stewart and Cyril Marcus were found dead in one of their New York City apartments, as per the New York Times. In the 1960s, though, the Marcus twins were extremely successful doctors. They published cutting-edge research in medical journals and eventually became assistant professors of obstetrics and gynaecology at New York Hospital and co-directors at Cornell Hospital’s Infertility Clinic, according to Collider.
According to Esquire, Cyril was the more withdrawn one, while Stewart was more outgoing. They were also apparently together almost all of the time, sharing everything from an office to a house in the Hamptons. But by the 1970s, both were addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines.
The pair began to deteriorate around the mid-1970s, according to the New York Times, which found that the brothers had begun to miss surgeries around the time of their decline, and their behaviour grew noticeably strange. Their once immaculate office became dirty, and the brothers both lost an extreme amount of weight. In July 1975, their bodies were found in Cyril’s apartment, which was apparently disastrously filthy, cluttered with trash, human waste, and empty bottles of barbiturates.
