[This is the eighteenth in an occasional series describing
British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the
movies.]
I describe here two “funny men” who much amused British and
global audiences at their peak in the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They quite
often appeared in the same films but they were very different personalities.
Terry-Thomas was a seasoned performer, well liked in his profession, cherished
by his public and mourned for his ill-health. Sellers was much the more
brilliant but he carried around a fatal cocktail of neuroses and complexes.
Losing his touch and behaving badly, his decline and fall did not come as a
surprise nor was he much regretted.
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| Terry-Thomas in 1951 |
Terry-Thomas (1911-90)
was born Thomas Stevens in the London suburb of Finchley, the son of the owner
of a Smithfield meat wholesaling business. His parents quarrelled constantly
making his adolescence difficult and both became alcoholics, divorcing in the
1920s. Terry-Thomas was sent to public school Ardingly College near Haywards
Heath, where he was happy though not academic. He was stage-struck, haunting
the Golders Green Hippodrome and was an early enthusiast for amateur dramatics:
he also adopted his dapper persona (he
was a fan of Douglas Fairbanks) and trained himself to speak with an upper
class accent.
Thomas made his stage debut in 1930 but his apprenticeship
was long and obscure. He tried his hand at professional ballroom dancing
partnered to a sister of Jessie Matthews, but found that too limiting. He
joined ENSA in 1938 and appeared in many wartime shows, making his name with
his versatile comic turns in Stars in
Battledress, until being demobbed in 1946. His West End breakthrough came
with Piccadilly Hayride, a show he
compered starring Sid Field which ran at the Prince of Wales from 1946 to 1948.
Various radio shows followed.
In 1956 he triumphed as Major Hitchcock in the wartime
comedy Private’s Progress, where he rather
upstaged the leading man Ian Carmichael and he coined his catch-phrase: “You
are a Shower, an absolute Shower!” He was signed up by the Boulting Brothers
and his films included old favourites like Blue
Murder at St Trinians, Lucky Jim (where he played the avant-garde critic
Bertrand Welch) and The Naked Truth, his
first film with Peter Sellers. In 1959 he starred again with Sellers and Russ
Tamblyn in Tom Thumb, which was
followed by I’m All Right, Jack where
Sellers won most of the plaudits. Better was Carlton-Browne
of the FO, with Terry-Thomas in his best silly-ass mode.
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| Villainous Peter Sellers and Terry-Thomas in Tom Thumb |
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| T-T puzzled as Carlton-Browne |
His
career in the British film industry was coming to an end as he was lured
to Hollywood, but not before making amusing School
for Scoundrels based on Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship books and Terry-Thomas as the quintessential
gap-toothed cad and rotter.
Terry-Thomas’ Hollywood years were a mixed bag but he became
familiar to the US movie public with at least two roles. He was hilarious as Lt.Col.
Algernon Hawthorne in It’s a Mad, Mad.
Mad, Mad World (1963) fulminating
to an indignant Milton Berle about the hen-pecked American male and the
national obsession with bosoms and brassieres!
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| Milton Berle upset by caustic Terry-Thomas |
Terry-Thomas
also enlivened the British-made but American-financed epic Those Magnificent Men in their
Flying Machines (1965) where he played the conspiring bounder Sir Percy
Ware-Armitage.
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| T-T as a Magnificent Man |
His
American swansong was with Jack Lemmon, who became a firm friend, in How to Murder your Wife.
His good days were over. He left Hollywood and appeared
in second-rate Continental films, although he was seen on US chat shows. In
1971 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and gradually he only appeared in short
cameos and finally disappeared altogether. Living with his supportive third
wife in Ibiza, his fortune was eaten up by medical bills. They had to return to
the UK finally living in a dismal charity flat. Theatrical friends organised a
benefit which raised £85,000, half going to the Parkinson’s Society and half to
Terry-Thomas allowing him to take a place in a nursing home in Godalming, where
he died, aged 78, in 1990. This was a sad end for a warmly recognised actor
who had brought laughter to a whole generation.
Peter Sellers (1925-80), born in Portsmouth,
was the son and only child of Bill and Peg Sellers, who were touring music hall
entertainers. Bill was an easy-going Anglican while Peg was a dominating Jewish
lady to whom Peter was very close; Spike Milligan much later said this
closeness was “unhealthy in a grown man” and was certainly the source of many
later hang-ups. The family settled in Muswell Hill, North London in 1935 and at Peg’s insistence, Peter was
privately educated at Catholic St Aloysius College. Peter was attracted by his
mother’s Jewish heritage and he was a top pupil at school, known as “the Jewish
boy”. At the outbreak of war in 1939, St Aloysius was evacuated to Cambridge,
but Peg would not allow Peter to go and he left school aged 14.
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| Peter Sellers the young drummer |
The
family moved to Ilfracombe, Devon, and Peter worked backstage in the local
theatre. He also became very adept as a jazz drummer and was billed locally as
“Britain’s answer to Gene Krupa!” Peter joined ENSA, entertaining the troops,
and then was called up to the infantry where his impersonations of senior
officers were much admired. After he was demobbed he worked spasmodically but
then was discovered by BBC Radio where he was a supporting player and voice in
many comedy radio shows.
His
breakthrough came with The Goon Show
(1951-60) which started with an audience of 370,000 listeners and finally
reached 7 million. Peter Sellers with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe,
performed in an original and anarchic show, re-writing the radio comedy genre.
.jpg) |
| Goons Milligan, Sellers and Secombe |
Sellers
started to work in films but he was mainly in a supporting role. He was a
Teddy-boy member of Alec Guiness’ gang in The
Ladykillers (1955), an eccentric cinema projectionist in The Smallest Show on Earth and a
wicked parody of Scots comedians as Sonny MacGregor in The Naked Truth (1957). He was second-string to Terry-Thomas in Tom Thumb (1958) but came into his own
as the uproarious shop-steward Fred Kite in I’m
All Right, Jack, much the best Sellers performance thus far.
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| Sellers brilliant as trades unionist Fred Kite |
Sellers
again displayed his versatility in The
Mouse that Roared playing 3 roles opposite Jean Seberg and amused me as the
Edinburgh accountant outwitting brash consultant Constance Cummings in The Battle of the Sexes (1960), based on
the Thurber story The Catbird Seat.
Sellers
had a foolish infatuation with Sophia Loren when making The Millionairess and then made 2 flops The Waltz of the Toreadors and Mr
Topaze. In 1962 he divorced his wife of 12 years Anne Howe and threw his
children out of his house in a typical display of childish willfulness. He
decided to leave England for the USA.
In
1962 he well played the part of oddball Quilty in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita with James Mason and Sue Lyon.
Then Blake Edwards persuaded him to take on the part of Inspector Clouseau for
the first Pink Panther film – a
franchise that was to keep him going over 5 sequels. He created a classic comic
character. Equally brilliant was his 3-part portrayal of President Merkin
Muffler, RAF Group Captain Mandrake and wheelchair-bound fanatic Dr Strangelove in Kubrick’s film of that
name in 1963.
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| Herbert Lom and Sellers as Inspector Clouseau |
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| Sellers multi-roles in Dr Strangelove |
In
retrospect this was probably the apex of his career. In 1964 he married
glamorous Britt Ekland after a whirlwind romance but in 1965, trying to enhace
his sexual performance, he overdosed on amyl nitrites and had 8 heart attacks.
Sellers recovered but his relationship with Ekland was riddled with his
paranoia and jealous insecurity and she filed for divorce. At the same time,
Sellers’ mother Peg died, sending him into a spiral of depression.
He
made more dud films like What’s New
Pussycat?, Casino Royale, The Bobo
and The Party, more frenetic than witty. His only success was There’s a Girl in my Soup with Goldie
Hawn but he fell into a drug-fuelled and
alcoholic haze and outsiders thought his behaviour amounted to his being
certifiable. Somehow he managed to star in the well-received Return of the Pink Panther in 1974, but
he constantly quarrelled with directors, abused co-stars and threw tantrums.
His 3rd wife Miranda Quarry divorced him in 1974 but he remarried
starlet Lynne Frederick in 1977, treating her abominably although she was still
married to him when he died. Although he made a dire version of The
Prisoner of Zenda and an even worse Fu Manchu, his finally released film Being There, where he played the simple-wise gardener Chance, won
many high awards, though its fey merits escaped me.
After
he died of another heart attack in 1980, aged 54, good judges like the Boulting
Brothers rated him very highly as: “The finest comedian produced by this
country since Charlie Chaplin”. Sellers was indeed brilliant, but he was
undisciplined and an impossible colleague. At the end he had morphed into a
monster and his death was a blessed release for him and for those who were
close to him.
SMD,
22.01.15
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald
2015
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