FREDDIE STARR FOUND DEAD
Troubled comedy legend, 76, collapses in Spanish flat
FREDDIE Starr was found dead in his Spanish apartment yesterday afternoon, aged 76.
The controversial comedian, huge in the 1970s and 80s, was known for his madcap humour – and those rumours he ate a pet hamster.
One neighbour in Mijas, Costa del Sol, said last night: “He has been quite ill ever since he moved in and has barely left his apartment since
FREDDIE Starr was a household name long before he was accused of eating a live hamster.
But even though he always denied it ever happened, the TV comic will probably best be remembered for prompting the headline in 1986: Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster.
He wrote about it in his autobiography: “I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal.” The story was apparently made up by publicist Max Clifford to boost the comic’s career.
Freddie burst on to the comedy scene after starring on talent show Opportunity Knocks and doing the 1970 Royal Variety Performance.
In the 70s and 80s he then was among the highest-paid stars on TV, alongside other working-class comics such as Frank Carson, Benny Hill, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson.
But his career tailed off in the 90s and after comeback attempts on shows such as I’m A Celebrity, Freddie was plagued by allegations of sex abuse as part of Operation Yewtree in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Although he was never charged, he said it made him consider suicide.
It was another turbulent chapter in his troubled life.
Born Frederick Fowell on January 9 in Liverpool in 1943, he had a terrible childhood, during which his father beat him so badly he broke both his legs. At the age of six, Freddie was removed from his parents. As a young boy he became so traumatised he lost the power of speech for two years.
“I didn’t have a very nice childhood and I find it very hard to talk about,” he admitted in a 2007 interview.
“But I got through that and moved on. That’s all I could do.”
Freddie found that humour was a great healer, and he became the class clown at school. “I never ‘discovered’ that I was funny,” he said. “My comic streak was just always there’.”
He got married
for the first time at 17 and embarked on a career as a singer with Merseybeat pop group The Midnighters. He introduced gags and impressions into the act, which went down well with audiences.
He changed his name to Freddie Starr in 1969 and starred on Opportunity Knocks with his trademark Hitler in wellies skit in the same year. At the Royal Variety Performance, he was only given a three-minute set but was the first person to be allowed to do an encore in 47 years. Looking back on this career-changing moment in 2007, he said: “I was 20-odd when I did that. Loads of people were telling me not to do this impression, and not to do that impression, until I had no act left. I decided to stuff them all and just do it, and I got a standing ovation for it.”
Years of solid success on stage followed, where workaholic Freddie would perform two shows a day.
Away from the stage, Freddie divorced his first wife Betty in 1972 after 12 years. They had a son.
He had three children with his second wife, Sandy, in the 70s, before a bitter divorce after 18 years of marriage which also led to a rift with his son and two daughters.
In 1998, he wed his third wife Donna for the first time. They were married and divorced twice.
In 2008, he blamed TV’s Celebrity Wife Swap for “finishing” his marriage, after Donna, 27 years his junior, accused him of being a layabout in a manual for former pin-up Sam Fox.
“It’s finished,” he raged. “If Donna wants a new kitchen let her get off her a**e and go out and get a job to pay for it. This is the finish of me and Donna. I don’t like knives in my back. She has done me up like a kipper.”
The couple, who had a daughter, split for good in 2010.
He wed his fourth wife Sophie, 39
years his junior, in 2013. The couple divorced three years later and Sophie claimed he had subjected her to physical and verbal abuse.
She reported him to police claiming he left her with a black eye.
After the split, Freddie was living in Spain and was spotted singing Elvis songs on karaoke, entertaining a handful of people at Shaggy’s Music Bar near his Costa del Sol home.
Before this he had attempted to get his once hugely successful career back on track. In 2004 he appeared on television as one of the celebrities in the second series of the ITV reality show Celebrity Fit Club. He was made team captain, but was demoted three weeks later for not taking the role seriously.
He was due to tour in 2010, but it was cancelled when he suffered a major heart attack resulting in quadruple heart-bypass surgery.
In 2011, he took part in I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here, where he was hospitalised after he suffered an allergic reaction to a Bushtucker trial.
He became breathless during a ‘Greasy Spoon’ challenge as he ate a rotten egg, a pig’s anus, a camel’s toe, turkey testicles, mealworms and mice tail and drank a cockroach milkshake – perhaps finally proving he could never have stomached a live hamster.