Beatles Legend John Lennon Had Surprising Connection to ‘90s Sitcom Star Peter Boyle
John Lennon played a surprising role in the wedding of an Everybody Loves Raymond star. At a Paley Center event honoring the 30th anniversary of the CBS sitcom, show creator Phil Rosenthal revealed that the Beatles legend served as the best man at actor Peter Boyle’s 1977 wedding.
“Two interesting things about Peter Boyle,” Rosenthal said of the late actor, per The New York Post. “He studied to be a monk when he was younger. …And the other thing is, I wonder if you know this. You know who the best man at his wedding was? John Lennon. He was cool, Peter Boyle.”
Boyle, who played Frank Barone for nine seasons on Everybody Loves Raymond, met Lennon through his then-girlfriend, Loraine Alterman, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine and was friendly with Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono.
Boyle previously spoke about his friendship with Lennon in an interview with the Television Academy. “We're both born under the sign of Libra,” Boyle noted. “He's October 9th and I'm October 18th. But my wife knew, was friendly with Yoko, and knew John, and we just started hanging out with him a little bit. We’d go to dinner with him and talk about everything."
"When we got married, we had an informal nondenominational wedding at the UN chapel," Boyle continued. "And at the last minute somebody said, ‘You have no best man,’ and I asked John if he would stand in, so he did.”
In 2005, the actor told Philadelphia magazine that Lennon did not sing at the wedding but that his participation in the ceremony was “memorable.”
Boyle, who died in 2006 at age 71, once described his bond with Lennon. “We were both seekers after a truth, looking for a quick way to enlightenment," he once said, per CBS News.
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