I have written about actors and actresses of the greatest
distinction who packed and electrified West End theatres or enlivened artistic
seminars and Thespian workshops. Now I pay tribute to an artiste who never
reached those heights but whose appearances on film or TV were eagerly
anticipated by his hordes of British fans and who has given audiences enormous
pleasure.
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| Kenneth Williams |
Kenneth Williams
(1925-88) was born in London the son of a barber, Charlie, (whom he greatly
disliked) and waitress Louie (whom he adored). He claimed Welsh ancestry.
Modestly educated, he became an apprentice draughtsman at a cartographer.
During the Blitz he was evacuated to the home of a bachelor vet in Bicester,
Oxfordshire and got a taste for educated middle-class life. He acquired an
upper-class accent which became his trademark. Called-up to the Army, he worked
at map-making for the Royal Engineers Survey team in India. Towards the end of the
War he joined the services entertainment organisation and would appear in
concert-parties entertaining the troops.
Learning this new trade, he became a busy actor when he
returned to London and appeared in small roles in West End plays and latterly
in revues. He never played Hamlet but
he was The Dauphin in a production of Shaw’s Saint Joan. In truth although he later starred in the West End in My Fat Friend in 1972 spindle-shanked
Williams was never much better than an adequate actor.
But he began to find his true métier: radio still had a
huge audience and it had a requirement for “funny voices”. Williams could
provide dozens of them. In the greatly followed Hancock’s Half-hour from 1954-58
he affected a camp-gay accent and introduced his giggling catch-phrase “Stop
messing about!” He moved on to the Kenneth Horne comedy shows Round the Horne and Beyond our Ken creating characters like Rambling Syd Rumpo, the folk-singer, and outrageously gay Sandy in
the duo Julian and Sandy with Hugh Paddick.
In 1958 the Carry On
series of broad British comedy films started and the franchise lasted until
1978. Williams appeared in normally leading roles in 26 of the 31 films. The
plots were farcical, double entendres
abounded, the slapstick comedy was predictable and sometimes dire. The public
loved them though the tinkling box-office did not enrich the actors – Williams
was usually paid a flat fee of £5,000 per film – but rather the producer Peter
Rogers and director Gerald Thomas.
Kenneth Williams was instantly recognisable with his nasal
exaggeratedly upper crust accent, the flared nostrils, his contempt for
underlings and the look of pained surprise when hectic events did not move in
his favour. Often the unsolicited target of the affections of towering Hattie
Jacques or romantic Joan Sims he never prospered in love and was regularly
outwitted by Cockney-Aussie Sid James of the lecherous cackle. Whether he was
the villainous Khazi of Kalabar, superior Dr Tinkle, stabbed Julius Caesar
(“Infamy, infamy, they all have it in for me!”) or French revolutionary Citizen
Camembert, assisted by his bumbling servant Bidet (Peter Butterworth), Williams
could be depended upon to raise many a belly-laugh.
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| The Khasi of Kalabar |
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| The stricken Caesar |
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| Citizen Camembert with Joan Sims |
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| Dr Carver with Charles Hawtry |
Williams moved on to become a radio and TV “celebrity”,
always an ephemeral calling, but he was very professional and excelled for
years on the radio show “Just a Minute”.
He was a regular on TV chat-shows with a reputation as a bright and witty
raconteur. He was self-educated and was in many ways surprisingly erudite. For
years he was a member of the council of Equity, the actors’ trades union.
There was however a dark side to Williams’ private life. He
was gay, which nobody really cares about nowadays, but he was career-building
at a time that homosexual acts were criminalised in Britain; the law was only
changed in 1967. His home life was unhappy in that his father Charlie was a
bully, a homophobe and a violent drunk who played the Methodist patriarch at
home. He would jeer at his son, calling him “a pansy” (and worse), causing
Kenneth to lock himself in this bedroom and seethe. In 1962 Charlie suddenly
died in agony at home after drinking carbon tetrachloride (a cleaning fluid)
from a bottle labelled as “cough mixture”. An inquest found a verdict of
misadventure but the police for a period suspected Kenneth of poisoning his
father. Their file must have remained open as a year or two later Kenneth was refused
a US visa because of this suspicion. In the event no charges were ever brought.
Kenneth Williams was a highly repressed and fastidious
homosexual. Although he moved in circles quite ready to take a trip to Morocco
to cavort with local “rough trade”, Kenneth himself was untactile and claimed
to have lived an almost completely chaste life. He went to Morocco with his
outrageous friend the playwright Joe Orton and Orton’s partner (and later
murderer) Kenneth Halliwell. Williams also accompanied gay couple Clive Dennis
and Tom Waine to Morocco and was much offended when they introduced a local
hunk and encouraged intimacy and when they doctored his breakfast with hashish!
Dennis and Waine became his best friends – Tom Waine was said to be the love of
Williams’ life, apparently a platonic love.
Williams had an acid tongue and made himself unpopular on
the Carry-On set by making
disparaging comments about the acting talents of most of the team. He was on
friendly terms with Barbara Windsor, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor and Hattie
Jacques but he had a running feud with Sid James. Apart from his closeness to
his ailing mother Louie, Kenneth had only a few show-biz friends – Stanley
Baxter, Gordon Jackson, Sheila Hancock and Maggie Smith.
His pen was even more lethal. A selection from his diaries
was published posthumously and his bitchy comments revealed his insecurities,
his sense of failure and his gathering depression. As a lover of calligraphy
and as a professional cartographer Williams’ diaries are physically
astonishing. He would use differently coloured inks to write about say, the
theatre or about his mother: stranger still, he changed his handwriting style
entirely, depending on the subject. He can be seen as about five different personae – a riddle and a rich
case-study for the perceptive psychiatrist.
Kenneth Williams died in 1988 after taking an overdose of
barbiturates. Officially it was accidental but it might have been intentional.
His last words in his diary were: “Oh,
what’s the point….?”
It was a sad exit for an unhappy and frustrated National
Treasure.
SMD
20.02.17
Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2017
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