Further Details On Neil Hope's Last Years

The shock and dismay at the news of the death of the child actor, famous globally for his role as Wheels on Degrassi, is still being felt weeks after the public learned he had died in November 2007.

He'd been diagnosed in his early 20s with diabetes and needed four daily insulin shots, which he often didn't take. He also struggled with alcoholism, a lack of money (Degrassi was non-union and there was no income from the show after it ended) and homelessness.

Hope was a frequent visitor at his local record store where he would sell his Playstation 2 for cash and buy it back weeks later. He last stopped in in early November 2007 and one of his friends who worked behind the counter remembered him wearing an eye patch and not making much sense.

The landlord of his rooming house found him a few weeks later, on November 25th. Hope had died of a heart attack, surrounded by vials of insulin that had been filled in September but not used. Word got back to his record store pals but not to his family. They contacted Hamilton police in 2009, but they had no record of his death. It was only when the family got in touch again last month that they learned he had been buried in an unmarked grave.

Unlike his fellow Degrassi co-stars, Hope hadn't kept up any sort of online presence with a website or Facebook page. He also didn't leave much of a paper trail and few outside of his immediate circle had more than sporadic contact with him.

Hope had been engaged in 2000, but when it ended, according to his family, he drifted again. He wound up spending a year crashing with his brother, where he was known to shower his nieces with surprise bags. The last contact his family had from him was a hand-written note, all in caps, as was his style, asking about his nieces.

The family has not yet announced when his grave is but are preparing his gravestone to read, “In loving memory of Philip Neil Hope — Wheels — September 24 1972 to November 2007.”