As long As he needs me...
The film Oliver! turns 50 this year. So what happened to Shani Wallis who played Nancy?
IN A career spanning 66 years, the US-based British singer and actress Shani Wallis has worked with entertainment’s finest from Morecambe And Wise, Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill to Richard Burton, Noel Coward, Danny Kaye, Liberace, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and Juliet Prowse.
But it is a film musical celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2018 for which Wallis will always be best remembered. Based on the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Oliver! also starred Mark Lester in the title role, Ron Moody as Fagin, Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Harry Secombe as Mr Bumble and Jack Wild as The Artful Dodger, and won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Wallis played Nancy whose songs were As Long As He Needs Me, Oom-Pah-Pah and It’s A Fine Life – which is the working title of the autobiography she’s currently writing at the age of 84.
Success in musicals both in the UK and US prompted writer and critic Kenneth Tynan to label her “the English Judy Garland”. More than five decades of living in the US have given the very chatty Wallis an unusual mid-Atlantic Cockney accent. “I can’t believe it has been 50 years,” she says, adding that she divides her life into the time before and after her appearance in the film, so important was Oliver! to her career.
“Its fans and my continuous new young followers remind me constantly each time they see it by writing with love and joy. So how is it possible to feel old, and how could it feel like 50 years? More like just a minute or two.”
Born in Tottenham on April 16, 1933, Wallis says she was always destined to entertain: “From when I came out of the womb I never wanted to do anything else. I don’t remember ever not wanting to sing, dance, play piano and act. My father James Wallis became deaf in the First World War as a cavalryman suffering explosions and gas. He thought I was the cat’s whiskers but he never heard me sing.”
Having learnt ballet and tapdancing in childhood, Wallis won a scholarship to top drama school Rada. For her first job, in 1951, she took over from Audrey Hepburn in an all-girls show at Ciro’s nightclub in London. At 18 she made her theatrical debut in the musical Call Me Madam at the London Coliseum. Other stage shows followed in the West End and Broadway. In 1957, in only her third film, A King In New York, Charlie Chaplin cast her as a cabaret singer.
“Chaplin invited me up to his suite at the Savoy Hotel but there was no funny business!” she chuckles. “I watched him as he wrote The Nickelodeon Song for me.”
WALLIS moved to the US and there met the American agent Bernie Rich who became her husband in 1968 – the year Oliver! was released. One of her guest appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show had earned her an audition for Nancy, for which she beat off competition from Elizabeth Taylor, Georgia Brown and Shirley Bassey.
“I remember the producer John Woolf asking if I could do a Cockney accent and I said, ‘Of course, I come from Tottenham!’ I was lucky enough to be chosen. Maybe I had the ‘family’ quality required. But I always felt Lionel Bart [the creator and composer of Oliver!] didn’t think I had the right to do it.”
Of Oliver Reed as Nancy’s bullying boyfriend Bill Sikes, she recalls: “I hardly spoke a word to him. He was a p***er. All he wanted was to go through every girl in the chorus. Perhaps not having any relationship was better for both of us onscreen.” But Wallis had a great relationship with the children in the cast, including Mark Lester and Jack Wild. “All the kids were incredible. Mark was a serious kid and we had to do things to make him laugh. Jack had a wonderful personality. All the cast were perfect for their parts.”
Lester and Wild both subsequently went off the rails, indulging in drugs and drink respectively. Lester recovered but left acting to become an osteopath and recently married for the third time at the age of 59. An alcoholic at 21 and a heavy smoker, Wild died from mouth cancer in 2006 aged 53. “Child actors are very prone to all that. I do feel they should’ve had help, especially Jack,” she says.
Wallis admits that after Oliver! she made “a lot of mistakes” professionally. “When I returned to America I had offers to do what became a very famous series on television, The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family – I can’t remember which. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to do movies. I lost out to Jean Seberg for the female lead in the 1969 movie musical Paint Your Wagon, starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Others, like Doctor Dolittle, flopped and they decided not to make any more and that was a big blow.” Wallis went on to appear in films such as Terror In The Wax Museum and Mayday At 40,000 Feet, TV series such as Charlie’s Angels and Murder She Wrote, and daytime soap The Young And The Restless in which she was a regular. But her greatest triumphs have been on stage, including a Broadway show, a stint in Las Vegas and tours with Liberace and Jack Benny. “I may be forgotten in Britain but I’ve been extremely lucky in America,” she says. “Jack Benny was like a father to me. When I was working in Vegas with Jack, Edward G Robinson came to Jack’s dressing room after a show and I sat with him on the floor in the room. At the time he was deaf like my dad but we communicated so well. I travelled with Liberace for years, all over the world, I adored him. He loved me to wear boas – anything that made me look larger than life – and he bought me jewellery to make me look flash, then said on stage, ‘Shani, where are my sunglasses!’
“I was booked on Dean Martin’s show in California and happened to be playing Vegas at the same time. I chartered a plane to get there and back so as not to miss shows. It was fun but crazy because [husband] Bernie loved flying and I hated it! In Vegas, Frank Sinatra would introduce me from the stage saying, ‘We’ve got Shani Wallis in the audience… she did a wonderful job in Oliver!’ That gives me goosebumps even now.
“One reason I wish I was young again is I didn’t appreciate all the exciting things that happened to me. It passed me by so quickly… I didn’t realise what an honour and thrill it was to be involved in so many great things.”
Since losing her husband of 48 years to cancer in 2016, Wallis has moved to a condo in southern California where she keeps mementoes of her career. Their daughter Rebecca, 46, who works in pharmaceuticals, and grandchildren live 20 minutes away but Wallis confides: “I’m so lonely. I miss my love Daily Express Tuesday January 2 2018 so much. I talk to him every day and cry every day.”
Nonetheless she keeps herself fit, proud to still be a size zero, and continues to sing and play piano. “I’d love to do an album again. If anyone wanted to do one with me I’d fly to the moon!” she adds.
This year Wallis will visit London to see old friends, including Mark Lester with whom she may raise a glass to celebrate Oliver!’s landmark anniversary.
hOWEVER she has mixed feelings about the British film company Working Title’s plan to remake Oliver! “The original is looked upon as a work of art. People love it, it’s timeless and will last for ever. If they think they can do it better, let’s see. I think it’s pretty perfect as it is. But maybe I could play Peggy Mount’s part of Mrs Bumble!”
Working Title denies rumours that Adele, another Tottenham songstress, will play Nancy. Even she would have struggled to surpass Wallis whose impact will live on long after her lifetime.
“I’m nobody now – I’m just me,” she says. “But there are a lot of Shanis around. Many mothers were pregnant when they saw Oliver! and called their daughters Shani and sent me pictures of them. It’s one of many reasons I feel very honoured to have been part of such a magnificent movie.”