The Vivienne was well on her way to becoming the 21st century’s answer to Lily Savage or Dame Edna Everage. Comically gifted and with a very modern mastery of makeup – there was nothing remotely slapdash about Viv’s transformative glam – she won the first UK edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2019, before parlaying her victory into appearances on Dancing on Ice, Celebrity Hunted and Emmerdale. By 2024, she was living the dream, wowing as the Wicked Witch of the West in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Wizard of Oz.
But James Lee Williams never got the chance to turn his status as a fledgling household name into proper cultural ubiquity: in January of this year, he died from cardio-respiratory arrest, a result of ketamine consumption. He was 32.
This tribute to Williams – who was mostly called Viv by friends and James by family, using female and male pronouns respectively – arrives a mere eight months later. God knows how hard it must have been for his parents to discuss his death in public so soon afterwards. “Did I say how proud I was?” his mum panically asks Williams’ sister off camera at one point. To conclude this documentary, those who were close to the artist – including his young niece – are asked to write him an imaginary letter. It is an utterly heart-wrenching device, and one that seems slightly exploitative in the context of such raw grief.
Before then, however, Dear Viv concerns itself with providing a lively, insightful and incredibly interesting account of Williams as a man and an entertainer. His reality background means there is copious footage of him discussing his life, interspersed here with testimony from family, friends and fellow queens alongside clips from early vlogs. We hear how he felt comfortable enough to come out as gay aged 14 at his north Wales private school, where he was an inveterate mischief-maker; his father, who worked there, recalls his attention-seeking antics with weary amusement. The same year, a Cher-induced internet wormhole led him to drag and, at 16, he moved to Liverpool by himself, finding his feet in the city’s club scene and acquiring the Vivienne Westwood fixation that produced his moniker. Later, a stint in Gran Canaria helped him finesse his raucous, accessible and very British act – “that old school rough and ready drag but with the polished look” as his friend and colleague Michael Marouli puts it.
Not long afterwards, his Drag Race audition tape – featuring impressions of Donald Trump, Cilla Black, Cher, Ab Fab’s Patsy Stone, Jennifer Coolidge and Kim Woodburn – won him a place on the lineup; his comic chops won him the series and many friends besides, especially Baga Chipz, who describes the pair as “a couple of fat bastards” (fellow queen Cheryl Hole affectionately likens them to Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets). Later Williams appeared on Drag Race All Stars – a queen of queens competition involving the franchise’s best contestants. Then, with some effort – Williams’ manager Simon Jones mourns the post-Savage evisceration of drag from the mainstream – he made inroads into primetime fare: he hoped his participation on Dancing on Ice would prove drag queens were “nothing to be feared”.
Off stage and screen, things weren’t quite so rosy. Williams arrived in Liverpool with an anti-drug attitude, but his new social circle soon normalised extreme partying. Post-performance comedowns cemented his dependence; he spent four years as a functioning ketamine addict – able to continue with life while under the influence and to hide it from his family. He went to Spain to break the cycle and by Drag Race his narrative was one of hard-won sobriety.
That wasn’t all. In an archive interview, Williams alludes to the intense loneliness he experienced before meeting his husband David, who “gave him something to live for” (they split up in 2023, for reasons not covered in the documentary ). His profession was a salve and a stress of its own – he was racked with insecurity on All Stars, feeling like “the runt of the litter” amid the US queens. Fascinatingly, we hear how being a drag queen bifurcated his very selfhood: he neglected James, spending all his money on clothes for The Vivienne and often wanting to lose himself in his imperious, invulnerable creation. It’s rare to hear this kind of candid deconstruction of drag, earnestness being anathema to camp. “As queer people we often hide from emotions,” says Hole, who explains how persecution can lead to emotional repression. We also witness Chipz explaining how his drag alter ego helps him to escape himself.
We don’t get similar insight into Williams’ relapse. Jones knew the performer was taking ketamine again (his family didn’t) and had arranged for counselling and therapy. Dear Viv is not presumptuous – or reductive – enough to impose a simple narrative on his death. Instead, it offers a warm and nuanced portrait of an artist as the giver of great joy – and of a man whose calling both allayed and intensified his vulnerabilities.
Dear Viv aired on BBC Three and is available on iPlayer
