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It's a story that is impossible not to love. A young man living in a French farming village in the 1950s undergoes an extraordinary growth spurt and becomes too ungainly to ride the bus to school. A neighbor with a convertible automobile steps in to help. The adult and the young man strike up an unlikely friendship on their morning car journeys, discussing the game of cricket and other subjects as they form a special bond with each other. The older man with the car? He was Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and author of Waiting for Godot, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. The boy? André Roussimoff, who would eventually grow to a height of more than seven feet and become famous as André the Giant, a global superstar and icon in the world professional wrestling. It's one of pop culture's most bizarre and cherished chance encounter tales. But is it true? The story, in its rudiments, has been around for years, but it has most prominently been told by Cary Elwes, the English actor who played Westley in the 1987 film The Princess Bride and became close with André (who played Fezzik) during the production of that movie. In his voiceover commentary to accompany behind-the-scenes footage of The Princess Bride released as a DVD extra in 2000, Elwes told the Samuel Beckett story as follows: Elwes recounted the story in greater detail in his 2014 memoir As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of the Princess Bride: The odd friendship between the two has captured the imagination for years and has inspired fictionalized portrayals in works such as a graphic novel, short film and two plays. The story is plausible on its face. Beckett did live near the Roussimoffs in Molien, a tiny hamlet in the town of Ussy-sur-Marne near Paris, from 1953 to 1960, when André was between the ages of seven and 14. According to an essay by the leading Beckett expert James Knowlson, at that time the Irishman did drive a Citröen 2CV, which was a convertible. Beckett was also a great fan of cricket, once a serious player himself. However, the April 2018 release of a documentary feature film about the wrestler, who died in 1993, brought the legend under renewed scrutiny. Jason Hehir, the director of André the Giant, was asked about the Beckett story in interviews surrounding the release of the film on HBO, telling Business Insider that the tale as commonly related was somewhat exaggerated: We got in touch with Hehir, who sent us an excerpt from the transcript of his interview with Antoine Roussimoff, a brother of André. Roussimoff said Beckett, along with other local adults, sometimes gave car rides to schoolchildren, but not exclusively to André, and not because he had outgrown the school bus. There was no bus, Antoine told the filmmakers: Roussimoff also put paid to the legend that his father had helped build Beckett's house for him, saying: We had nothing to do with Mr. Beckett. Absolutely nothing. My parents, they knew him when they would run into each other, that’s all. Similarly, Roussimoff dismissed a separate story that André was forced to leave school later in his teenage years because he could no longer be accommodated in the schoolhouse, such was his size: In an email, Hehir told us that André's other brother and one of André's childhood friends had both corroborated the version of events provided by Antoine Roussimoff, adding:
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