|
|
 |
| |
Leslie Phillips and Joan Sims in Carry on Teacher |
Ding Dong. It’s Leslie
Leslie Phillips made his name as the lecherous bounder but his latter years have seen him take more challenging roles, writes William Hall
Hello, by Leslie Phillips,
Orion Books, £18.99
HEL-LOH!” Nobody spoke those two syllables quite like Leslie Phillips, so it was only natural that this would be the title of his autobiography, just published. The cinema’s most famous – or notorious – roué first uttered it for public consumption in the 1960 comedy ‘Doctor in Love’, moustache twitching, blue eyes sparkling with the promise of seduction for some unsuspecting maiden. It became his trademark for close on half a century.
His book is a pot-pourri of adventures and anecdotes. The ‘Doctor’ films were first seen in 1954 with ‘Doctor in the House’. The rip-roaring comedy charted the misadventures of a group of medical students, led by Dirk Bogarde, and spawned six sequels.
Leslie came in comparatively late. “I put my own stamp on the character,” he recalls. “I uttered the simple word ‘hello’ in such a way as to imbue it with a plethora of meaning that immediately caught the public imagination.”
Yes indeed, even if one critic described the film as “A collection of weak sketches based on schoolboy smut.”
Leslie would virtually patent the expression as his own, along with its stable-mate “Ding Dong!” following his 1960 appearance as one Jack Bell in ‘Carry On Constable’.
“I’ve never really escaped it to this day,” he says. “I even wake up from dreams in which the epitaph on my grave reads: Hello – and Goodbye, with Ding Dong!”
In all Leslie Phillips would tuck away more than 100 films and 200 plays. His mother put him through stage school, and the early whiff of greasepaint hooked him for life.
On stage he was a cherub one month, the next a wolf in Peter Pan. “For the next 60 years I was seldom out of work for more than a few days, unless by choice,” he reports.
There was, of course, the minor interruption of World War II, where for health reasons he was judged unfit for active service.
Back on the boards, his first major role in a play called Army of Preoccupation found the audience “howling with laughter at everything I said”. He added: “Timing is vital in comedy, but it comes more naturally to some. I had found my natural metier, in comedy.”
Parts came thick and fast, and led to the West End “always playing toffs or silly asses,” as actress Kay Kendall once put it.
Then inevitably to film and TV. Hollywood beckoned, with Leslie playing a wealthy English banker in the musical Les Girls at MGM, directed by George Cukor.
Now he was here, there and everywhere. He recorded 250 episodes of The Navy Lark for BBC radio, extending over 17 years. But the major milestone in his career was Carry On Nurse (1959), for which he was paid the less-than-handsome sum of £100 a week by producer Peter Rogers – “who had the reputation of being as tight as a serpent’s arse”. The films poured out. Titles like The Fast Lady, Crooks Anonymous and Not Now Darling.
But in the late 1980s came a dramatic volte face. “Suddenly I was up for challenging roles,” he says. “Any parts involving lecherous twits with suave chat-up lines and dysfunctional trouser braces would not be considered!”
First out of the trap was Chapter 17, a study of alcoholism by Simon Gray – “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” The next was The Cherry Orchard, with Joan Plowright.
Away from the spotlight, his first marriage to actress Penny Bartley ended in 1965 after seventeen years and two children, with Leslie quoting pressure of work as the main cause. “Frankly,” he admits, “I’ve often thought of myself as a good father, but a doubtful husband.” With his second wife, actress Angela Scoular, they have travelled the world, touring together in the Middle East and Australia.
On screen the ‘new’ Leslie Phillips found himself in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987). In 1998 he was awarded an OBE. He featured in Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie, and played a “bizarre but memorable role” as the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. Today, at 82, he’s looking forward to his latest film Venus, which already has insiders talking up Oscars next year in a story of three old actors reminiscing about their lives – the others being Peter O’Toole Richard Griffiths. Now, for the indefatigable bounder of the British screen, wouldn’t that be something?
|
 |
|
|
|
|
