Master of comedy yearned to be serious
Nobody could invest a simple greeting such as ‘‘hel-low’’, or ‘‘I saa-y’’, with quite the same depths of lascivious innuendo as Leslie Phillips. It was partly to do with his unhurried, oaky voice, partly his smoothly expressive features: the ironically pursed mouth, the suggestively arched eyebrow.
No wonder he became cast, and for long periods typecast, as a suave, lusting, caddish womaniser. ‘‘My voice is recognised as clearly as my face,’’ he said in later life. ‘‘When I phone, say, the electricity company, they always recognise my voice before I’ve said my name.’’ He would often get requests to record himself saying ‘‘Hel-low’’ for answering machines.
With his blue eyes, fair hair and trim moustache, complete with cravat and blazer, he seemed like a charmer par excellence and it made him the comic star of numerous films, West End shows and television series. It may have been a limited field but he excelled in it.
Yet there was the feeling that, however brilliantly he performed in West End farces, there was more in him. In time Phillips himself sought to escape the shackles. He complained that comedy condemned him to play either sex maniacs or idiots and feared that the public would remember him only for leery lightweights.
Eventually he tackled Shakespeare, albeit the great comic character, Falstaff. He was keen to progress to King Lear, though he did concede, gloomily, that he would probably be billed as King Leer if he did so.
Although he spent much of his life playing toffs and bounders with impeccable accents, Leslie Samuel Phillips was born into a working-class family in Tottenham, north London.
His father, Fred, who worked for a company making gas cookers, died from rheumatic fever when Leslie was 9, leaving his mother, Cecilia, to bring up three children in considerable hardship. ‘‘When you walked down Angel Road, where the factories were, it always smelt of gas,’’ he recalled.
Determined to put him on the stage to bring in extra money, his mother answered a newspaper advertisement for child actors. The upshot was a place at the Italia Conti Stage School in central London, and his first stage appearance was as a wolf in Peter Pan at the London Palladium in December 1937.
As a boy soprano he sang at Covent Garden and appeared in the London production of Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus. From 14, he was the family’s main breadwinner, and on tour more or less permanently.
Actors such as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Rex Harrison became surrogate uncles. ‘‘They were my family. Very kind. They encouraged me to read books and educate myself.’’ They also helped him to lose his London accent.
He had bit parts in films, gained experience in regional repertory and returned to the West End in 1942.
He joined the army and, partly because he had learnt to talk with an upper-class voice, he was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Artillery. As part of his training, live ammunition was fired above him, an experience that left his nerves shattered. He was invalided out with a neurological condition that caused partial paralysis in 1944.
He returned to the stage, discovered a talent for comedy, and for the next 30 years was rarely absent from the West End. Although many of his vehicles were lightweight and soon forgotten, they gave much simple pleasure and Phillips emerged as one of the genre’s most accomplished actors.
Starting as a teenager, he appeared in more than 100 films. His early roles were in dramas, but he hit his comic stride in the 1950s in Brothers in Law, by the Boulting Brothers, and was in three of the early Carry On films.
One of his best-known catchphrases came from Carry On Nurse. His character was coming round in a hospital bed when he gazed upon a nurse played by Shirley Eaton.
Phillips: ‘‘I say, what’s your name, nurse?’’
Eaton: ‘‘Why, Nurse Bell, sir.’’ Phillips: ‘‘Ding dong, carry on.’’ It stuck, and for the rest of his life people would stop him in the street and say: ‘‘Go on, say it, say ding dong!’’
‘‘I did seem to get an awful lot of catchphrases,’’ he later reflected. ‘‘One that lots of surprisingly erudite people ask me to say is a line from that film when I was looking in the bathroom mirror and putting on some aftershave and I said, ‘Oh, you gorgeous beast.’ ’’
He loathed talking about the Carry Ons, and would instead refer to ‘‘the group I was with’’. He was also in three of the later, and lesser, Doctor comedies and made two films, Crooks Anonymous and The Fast Lady, with the about-to-bediscovered Julie Christie.
During the 1980s he played character parts in weightier films such as Out of Africa and Empire of the Sun, and was Lord Astor in Scandal (1988), an account of the Profumo affair. He was the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films but the best of his later films was Venus (2006), a bittersweet comedy by Hanif Kureishi in which he and Peter O’Toole played ageing actors whose lives are disrupted by a brash teenager.
During the 1980s Phillips also essayed classical drama for the first time, in The Cherry Orchard. His role in Peter Nichols’ Passion Play (1984-85) was another, and critically acclaimed, break from light comedy.
In his later years he was on the small screen with increasing frequency. Having appeared in John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey, Phillips went on to Mortimer’s Tuscany-based comedy-drama, Summer’s Lease. He was also the judge in the factbased dramas Who Bombed Birmingham?, the story of the Birmingham Six, and The Trials of Oz.
‘‘I don’t fear death,’’ he said at the time, ‘‘just illness and senility. But I do sometimes forget I’ve grown older.’’
On radio he was in many dramas, but his best remembered contribution was to The Navy Lark, which ran from 1959 to 1977 and in which he was the devious SubLieutenant Phillips, the doubtfully competent navigator of HMS Troutbridge. In 2000 he played a raffish MP reflecting on his career in Peter Tinniswood’s monologue, On the Whole It’s Been Jolly Good, which could have been a summary of his career.
His personal life was less serene. His first marriage, to Penelope Bartley, produced a child that was stillborn. They went on to have two sons and two daughters, but in 1965 she divorced him.
‘‘I don’t really know why it happened,’’ he said. ‘‘There were lots of factors. I was very fond of her and remained so. The story of why things go wrong is complicated. But it wasn’t a lack of love or care.’’
He believed the divorce knocked Penny off balance. She wouldn’t let him see the children and would ring his home and leave the phone off the hook so no-one else could get through. She died in a nursing home fire in 1981. Because he was on tour in Australia, he decided not to attend her funeral. He later acknowledged that his family never forgave him.
After this came a decade-long relationship with Caroline Mortimer, 18 years his junior and the daughter of the novelist Penelope Mortimer, and stepdaughter of John Mortimer. This ended because she wanted children and he did not want any more.
He then married Angela Scoular, an actress 21 years his junior best known for playing a Bond girl. That was in 1982. ‘‘The image of me as a womaniser was misleading,’’ he said in older age. ‘‘I always got on with women but I didn’t really have them throwing themselves at me. I much prefer being at home than in a nightclub. I do like my slippers.’’
He married again in 2013, at the age of 89, to Zara Carr, who was more than 30 years his junior. ‘‘I’ve always been one of life’s natural optimists,’’ he said, ‘‘despite some ghastly things happening to me over the years.’’
A lifelong supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, Phillips made an appearance on the pitch as part of the half-time entertainment during the team’s home match against Swansea City in 2012. He divided his time between a 200-year-old farmhouse in Spain and a Victorian house in Maida Vale, northwest London, that was cluttered with antique bronzes, sooty paintings, glassware and sepiacoloured photographs.
He could never be accused of false modesty. ‘‘I was brilliant in that play,’’ he might say, or ‘‘I was certainly marvellous with my children. Terrific.’’
But given the insecurities that must have come from always being typecast as upper-class despite his impoverished background, his self-aggrandising was perhaps understandable. He always wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, when all his fans wanted was for him to make them laugh.
The decision he took at the beginning of the 1980s to accept no more broad comedy roles made him nervous for a while. ‘‘My friends, my agent, my bank manager all thought I was mad, because I was at the top of the tree in comedy, but I knew I wasn’t.
‘‘There was an unnerving lull for a while, then I was offered a straight part in Peter Nichols’ Passion Play. That’s the role I’m most proud of playing. It changed everything for me. I wish the obituaries would lead on that, but I don’t suppose they will.’’ –
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