Freddie fallen the STARR
Hitler impressions. Hamster headlines. Drag acts. It’s hard to believe in these PC days, but Freddie Starr was once our best paid entertainer. This week, he died bloated, penniless and disgraced – and as his ex-wives reveal here, ruinously unfaithful
THE virtually unknown star making his first appearance at the Royal Variety performance on November 9, 1970, held the audience in the palm of his hand.
Strutting across the stage in a bedraggled dark brown wig and tight black trousers, lower lip jutting, the lithe 27-year-old comic suddenly dropped to the floor in the splits, springing back up with the elasticity of a gymnast.
Freddie Starr was early on the night’s bill, but his frenetic turn as Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, along with a send-up of comedian Norman Wisdom, earned him applause so rapturous he had to take not one, but two bows.
Contrast all that with a scene three years ago. The setting is Shaggy’s Music Bar, in the Spanish resort of Fuengirola, where a bloated and dishevelled grey-haired man with a blue T-shirt clinging to his expansive gut is belting out an Elvis Presley number.
The footage, which embarrassingly for Freddie made its way onto the internet, shows an audience more interested in their drinks than the shambolic, pitiful, vaguely familiar-looking figure at the mic. Yet this sad scene now serves to underline the last years of the once astonishing talent who was Freddie Starr.
Dogged by health problems, he was found dead in his Costa del Sol apartment on Thursday having suffered a heart attack at the age of 76. He was found lying naked on his floor by his cleaner after years of ill health.
It was the lonely, isolated finale of a man who was once the toast of light entertainment, but who died with the world believing he was a dirty old man. His name was forever tarnished following his arrest under Operation Yewtree, the infamous police investigation into historic sexual abuse, predominantly against minors. He was never charged, but the label stuck.
The Liverpool-born funnyman had memorably appeared on Opportunity Knocks, but it was that appearance before the late Queen Mother at the Royal Variety performance that sealed his success.
Catapulted to the bright lights, Freddie Starr headlined a string of shows in the Seventies and Eighties. For a time he was the highest-paid entertainer in Britain; he had yachts, a fleet of fast cars, a helicopter, and a Grand Nationalwinning racehorse (Miinnehoma won in 1994).
NEVER averse to publicity, even if it showed him in a less than positive light, he made endless mileage out of the 1986 red-top headline ‘ Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ (the story, created by disgraced publicist Max Clifford, was fiction). Even 30 years later he would be stopped in the street by members of the public wanting to know if it was true.
Starr’s reputation never recovered after he lost a damages case against 57-year-old Karin Ward, who claimed he groped her when she was 15. He had tried to sue his accuser, a victim of serial sex offender Jimmy Savile, for libel after she gave interviews saying she was ‘horribly, horribly humiliated’ by Starr.
She described him as having had a ‘very bad attack of wandering hands’ during the filming of a TV show in 1974. He was subsequently arrested, but did not face charges and denied all the claims.
But in 2015 a judge threw the libel case out and ruled Miss Ward’s testimony to be truthful.
Faced with a £960,000 legal bill he couldn’t pay, chain-smoker Starr fled to Spain, living out the last four years of his life in a £180,000 townhouse with five failed marriages (twice to the same woman) under his belt and seemingly scant relationship with his six children.
It’s not known whether the man who once admitted he was the ‘worst father in the world’ had any regular contact with his children before his death.
Whatever his failings, the crushing sadness of what might have been was encapsulated when Starr said in one of his last interviews, in 2015. ‘I don’t know where to turn. Most of my old showbusiness friends have forsaken me. I need help. I have no money left and I’m too ill to work. I don’t see a very pleasant future ahead of me. I’m not long for this world,’ he grimly foretold.
His words were to prove prescient. However, the showbiz world was quick to acknowledge Starr’s indisputable talents this week. Comedian Bobby Davro described him as the ‘funniest man I have ever seen’, while Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden
said: ‘Sad to hear of Freddie Starr passing today. His style may have fallen out of comedy fashion and favour — but it’s important to recognise his once huge popularity and fame.’
And it’s true; Starr was once the epitome of showbusiness success.
Born in 1943, in Huyton, Liverpool, as Frederick Leslie Fowell, Starr described his early years as ‘poor and bloody miserable’.
His mother was a housewife and his father a builder with a violent streak — the comedian once claimed his dad broke both his legs.
Aged six, he was institutionalised for two years, after losing the power of speech. He gave his own account of the ordeal, describing days spent counting the squares in the mesh of his bedroom window, getting just four visits from his family for the duration of his stay.
Singing was his way of overcoming the speech impediment that he was left with. He was nine when his mum enrolled him in the Hilda Fallon Roadshow (also a training ground for Ken Dodd and Keith Chegwin), and 14 when he landed a part in Liverpool-based movie Violent Playground.
But when the acting bug didn’t bite, he embraced music, becoming front man for bands, including the Midnighters, playing at venues like Liverpool’s Cavern and Hamburg’s Star Club alongside
Merseybeat hopefuls The Beatles. Then Starr joined cabaret outfit The Delmonts, and started doing the musical impressions that fans will be familiar with.
First was little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, in the style of horror actor Vincent Price. Then there was Elvis, Adam Faith and, of course, the Rolling Stones.
It was with The Delmonts that Starr appeared on television talent show Opportunity Knocks, in 1967, where they were winners six weeks in a row. By the time The Royal Variety Show rolled around in 1970, Freddie was a bona fide solo star.
The ITV sketch show Who Do you Do cemented the 5ft 6in star’s rise to the top and he became a household name, known for goosestepping about in nazi regalia as Adolf Hitler. It would be considered outrageous today, but in the 1970s it was comedy gold.
Unpredictable and anarchic, he once opened for Engelbert Humperdinck in las Vegas and was told not to do his Presley tribute. He promptly did a 20minute Elvis medley. Starr got away with it, the King was apparently highly amused. When he met Charlie Chaplin, the comedy legend reportedly told him: ‘you remind me of me as a young man in a lot of ways. you have got funny bones . . . you don’t have to open your mouth to make people laugh.’
The practical jokes went too far. When, long after his star had waned, he recorded an Audience With . . . show in the 1990s, he threw maggots at the very people who were there to pay tribute to him.
In 1997, he sparked outrage by hurling live chickens into an audience at the Britannia Pier Theatre, Great yarmouth.
As for smaller, furrier animals, he said of that famed hamster headline: ‘I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal.’
But his appetite for drugs took a toll and his personal life was a mess. Starr was just 17 when he married his first wife, Betty Simpson. They had a son, Carl, but divorced after 12 years when Betty caught him being unfaithful.
SPEAKING from her home in St Helens, Merseyside, yesterday Betty said Carl hadn’t seen his father since he was seven years old.
Of her ex-husband, she said: ‘I’m very sorry he’s gone, he was a very talented man, just not a very good husband. He was OK when he first started in showbiz, but the fame went to his head.
‘He was the best, he was brilliant while he was on stage, but he was a terrible husband.
‘When we were together I wanted him to keep his feet on the ground and be Freddie Fowell, not Freddie Starr, when he came home.’
That wasn’t Starr’s style. In his heyday he would boast about bedding 20 chorus line dancers, but much like his tale of once mistaking a canister of Dick Emery’s ashes for a tin of instant coffee, it’s hard to know just what was true.
Having left Betty, he went on to
have three children with his second wife Sandy Morgan, a dancer in his show, but that ended in a bitter divorce and sordid recriminations. Sandy alleged that their children were so afraid of their father during the marriage that they kept knives under their beds, a claim that he disputed.
Starr moved on to his former manager Trudy Coleman, with whom he had a daughter, before that too soured and he married his third wife, Donna, who was 27 years his junior.
They had a daughter called Ebony and a turbulent relationship that saw them marrying and divorcing twice.
With his career on the wane, in 2000 Starr admitted on Tonight With Trevor McDonald that he was downing handfuls of antidepressants a day.
There were attempts to revitalise his career that inevitably propelled him into the world of reality television.
In 2004, he appeared on Celebrity Fit Club but was demoted as team captain for not taking the format seriously. Then there was the 2008 decision to appear on Celebrity Wife Swap, with Donna; they exchanged with former Page Three model Samantha Fox and her partner Myra Stratton. But it was an unwise move; he claimed it wrecked his marriage.
yesterday, Donna, 48, said she was struggling to comprehend the news. At the three- bedroom
detached home she shares with the comic’s daughter, Ebony, in Redditch, Worcestershire, she said: ‘His children have woken up to see this news on the TV or social media. None of us had been told [of Starr’s death]. I don’t know how I feel about things at the moment. I’m just being here for my daughter.’
Starr met fourth wife Sophie Lea — a dancer on his tour — in 2010, the same year as his quadruple heart bypass. Unwisely, in 2011 he joined the line-up on I’m A Celebrity — but dropped out owing to ill health.
This marriage was similarly unsuccessful: they split in 2015, after Sophie claimed he’d given her a black eye. ‘Freddie would fly off in rages and take it all out on me daily,’ she said. ‘He started to give me constant verbal abuse, telling me I was useless and things like that. Our marriage was hell.
‘If I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea and a scone and I forgot the scone he would accuse me of disrespecting and neglecting him.’
When the legal bill for his failed libel case landed, Starr sold his home in Studley, Warwickshire, for almost £700,000, moving to Mijas, on the Costa del Sol — and leaving Sophie behind.
There, his existence seems to have been a sad one; a chain smoker he was severely asthmatic and needed a nebuliser to help him breathe.
Neighbours told yesterday how the entertainer stopped talking to them after the boss of the residential complex where he lived tried to get him to pay money he owed.
Spanish lawyers are now expected to put in a claim against the comic’s estate to try to recover the debt.
His carer, Nelly Georgieva, 47, originally from Bulgaria, is begging for the late comic’s family to get in touch. She described how Starr was ‘in love’ with her and said he had not heard from his family for four years.
‘I want the embassy to tell me what’s happening, what they’re doing with him,’ she said.
‘He was a good friend, very funny and happy,’ she added. ‘I loved him, not romantically, not sexually, but his personality. As a friend and companion.’
On his Facebook page Starr posted this missive, on April 30. He was upbeat, affable. Still trying to make people smile. Still Freddie. ‘Hello everyone hope everyone is OK? Me yes I’m OK getting tired more now but otherwise I’m doing good.’
Back in 1997, Starr said in an interview: ‘I’ve always gone my own way. I’ll carry on doing that till I die.
‘I’ll always be a rebel and people will always write about me in newspapers. I accept that. I could never be a Cliff [Richard], I’d be afraid of being squeaky clean.’
There was never any danger of that.