How the sauciest charmer in showbiz hid a world of private pain
As Carry On star Leslie Phillips dies at 98 ...
LESLIE PHILLIPS spoke almost exclusively in wolf-whistles. With just a long- drawled ‘ Hel- lo’, he could convey surprise, appreciation, flirtation and a hint of sexual menace. Critics called it fruity, but this was a decadent kind of fruit — cherries soaked in brandy, perhaps. It was the voice of a man who was used to getting slapped in the face, in the pursuit of a bit of slap-and-tickle.
And all he’d said was ‘Hello . . .’
His sauce, best encapsulated by ‘Ding-dong!’ — another of his suggestive catch-phrases — would have struggled to fit into today’s stricter MeToo mores. His fame peaked as an actor in the Carry On films, but to a new generation he was the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter franchise, his purring voice delighting children and adults alike, though the latter in a more knowing way.
But Phillips, who has died aged 98, lived through far more hardship and emotional turmoil than any film fan could guess from his insouciant style. The airy flamboyance masked a life beset with tragedies, including the death of his first wife in a house fire, after a long depressive illness, and the suicide of his second when she was dying from bowel cancer.
Born in Tottenham, North London, in 1924, Leslie grew up in a penniless working- class family. ‘We were bloody poor,’ he would recall fiercely. His father, who suffered from chronic heart disease, struggled to earn enough as a gas fitter to keep the family fed. The family home was overshadowed by tragedy: his uncle had drowned himself in 1918 while home on
‘Ding-dong! You’re not wrong,’ he quipped in Carry On Nurse
leave, rather than return to the trenches, and his grandfather had hanged himself a few years later, aged 65, the day after he retired.
When a heart attack took his father, Leslie was 11. To pay their debts, his mother Cecelia sold the house: they were left with £15.
Spotting his talent for dressing up, Cecelia took him to a West End stage school, hoping the boy could get work as a child extra in theatre. Despite his ringing Cockney accent, he was taken on and was soon running errands for stars such as Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison, who taught him how to speak on stage.
Theatre had other attractions. He would hang around the dancers’ dressing rooms between numbers, watching the girls change costume. Ogling was tolerated but touching was not, and when he tried to grab a cuddle and a kiss, the young Lothario was reported to the famously tyrannical producer Binkie Beaumont.
‘It taught me a lesson about actresses,’ Phillips lamented. ‘However inviting they seem, beware — they may bite.’
His newly acquired suave tones and his slightly louche air got him noticed beyond theatre. Soon he was a regular in bit parts at Pinewood Studios. He also sang in opera choruses, an experience that thrilled 14-year-old
Leslie for all the wrong reasons.
‘It gave me a taste for classical music that has never left me,’ he admitted, ‘and nor has my appreciation of busty women with breasts bursting from gorgeous frocks.’
In 1942, he was called up, but sporadic bursts of unexplained paralysis (perhaps a form of shellshock) meant he was discharged from active service.
The illness probably saved his life — his regiment, the Durham Light Infantry, suffered severe losses on D-Day, and several of his friends were killed, making Phillips at turns grateful for not taking part and racked with guilt.
Demobbed in 1944, he returned to theatre, touring in repertory companies. But Phillips didn’t make life easy for himself: he rejected an offer to tour Australia performing Shakespeare with
Larry Olivier, because there was no place in the cast for his then girlfriend, actress Penny Bartley. He married Penny in 1948 but tragedy struck immediately: their first baby was stillborn. Four more children came along over the next few years, but Phillips never forgot that early grief.
Quick to take offence and slow to forget a grudge, he refused to play the showbiz games that helped other actors to get work.
After an audition for leading film producers Roy and John Boulting, the brothers asked Leslie to give them a lift across London to Chelsea. A less prickly man might have regarded that as a tacit job offer: Phillips fumed at being treated as a chauffeur, and made a point of turfing them out of the car on Park Lane, leaving them to find a taxi.
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get that part — but three years later, Roy Boulting offered him a cameo role, opposite Terry-Thomas, a man who also found fame playing cads and from whom Phillips is said to have borrowed that lascivious ‘Hel-lo . . .’.
Phillips couldn’t, or wouldn’t, play the scene the way Boulting wanted, and in the end the director grabbed him by the arm to force him into position.
Leslie elbowed him in the stomach, hard enough to wind him. That was the end of his career with the Boulting Bros.
But in 1959 another British producer transformed Leslie’s career. The executive was Peter Rogers, and the film, which would become the biggest box office success of the year, was Carry On Nurse.
The pay was poor — £500 for five weeks’ work. But for Phillips there was a bonus: several of his scenes were with actress Shirley Eaton, who became a screen icon five years later as the Bond girl killed by gold paint in Goldfinger.
In his memoirs, Phillips described her as ‘jaw- droppingly beautiful’ and ‘ deliciously sexy’. On screen, he looks at her the way a leopard eyes a lamb. Eaton played a nurse, Phillips a patient called Jack Bell. On the first day’s shooting, she had to introduce herself by asking his name — ‘Mr Bell?’
‘Ding- dong! You’re not wrong,’ replied Leslie, and the chime became his trademark.
Eager to capitalise on his Carry On success, Rogers rebooked Phillips for Carry On Teacher, as a schools inspector who falls for the gym mistress, Miss Allcock. Phillips was warned that if he made too much of the name, the censor would object, but that purring voice was incapable of making anything sound bland.
‘ However flatly I said it,’ he chuckled, ‘it was still very suggestive.’ He claimed he made the next in the series, Carry On Constable, for the chance to film a topless shower scene with Eaton . . . though the nudity that everyone remembers from that movie is when he, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor dash naked through the cell block.
Frustrated at the low wages, Phillips warned Rogers that he would not return unless he received a slice of the profits. The producer retorted that the only star in his movies was the ‘Carry On’ name — and dropped him.
He took swift revenge. He plunged into a flirtation at Pinewood with Rogers’s wife, Betty Box, who was Britain’s first female film producer.
She had her own comedy film franchise, the Doctor series, and offered him a leading role. He declared this a far superior chance: ‘a stronger script, better storyline, altogether classier’. Three films followed — Doctor In Love, Doctor In Clover and Doctor In Trouble.
They also led to some of his most successful movie roles, as a com
‘However f latly I said it, it was still very suggestive,’ he recalled
pulsive thief in
Crooks Anonymous and a usedcar salesman in
The Fast Lady, with Julie Christie.
His career was at its height, but his personal life was a disaster zone. Despite his dalliances with everyone from au pairs to actresses, Phillips claimed to be ‘a loyal and faithful husband — especially by the standards of my profession’.
But, aged 37, in a West End thriller called The Big Killing, he plunged into an affair with his 19-year-old co- star Carrie Mortimer. Her parents were outraged, and it wasn’t long before Penny found out.
His wife was ‘inconsolably bitter’, and Phillips felt hard done by when she demanded a divorce. ‘She knew I would be tempted from time to time,’ he complained.
Success softened the blow. He began a two-year West End run in the comedy Boeing-Boeing, bought a house in Ibiza with Carrie and had more movie success with films such as Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something! with Joanna Lumley and Brian Rix. He also earned a reputation as a playboy. An enterprising Mercedes salesman once sold him a car, a convertible sports model in racing green, by parking it outside his theatre in the Strand and waiting for him to spot it.
Carrie wanted children but, rather than start another family, Leslie split from her. Now aged 50, he sensed that the public was growing tired of his image: his sitcom Casanova ’73, in which he played a failed rake, was a flop, and when he opened in 1977 at the Criterion Theatre in a saucy comedy called Sextet, critics dubbed him ‘King Leer’.
The play reunited him with another Bond girl, Angie Scoular, who had co-starred with him in a Doctor movie. He took her to Ibiza, and then to South-East Asia on the Pacific tour of a farce called Not Now Darling, with Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs.
While they were in Australia, Phillips learned that Penny had died in a fire at their former home. His children wanted him to return to London for the funeral, but he refused. ‘My family have never really forgiven me,’ he acknowledged 30 years later in his memoirs, titled Hello.
He married Angie and started to take more serious roles. His most prestigious film parts followed, as the governor of Kenya in the Oscarwinning Out Of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and then working with Steven Spielberg on Empire Of The Sun.
The theatre production Phillips was most proud of, Passion Play by Peter Nichols, earned rapturous reviews. But during rehearsals, tragedy struck again. His mother, then in her 90s, was mugged by three youths near her Essex home.
Hanging on to her bag, she was dragged across the road and broke many bones. The muggers ran off without the bag; Cecelia slipped into a coma and died.
A few months later, Phillips’s sister Doris, who had been caring for their mother for years, also died.
It would not be his last tragedy. Angie, who had been suffering from depression, slid into alcoholism.
She fought bowel cancer in the early Noughties and, fearing in 2011 that the disease had returned, she died of harrowing burns after drinking drain cleaner. Phillips found her body: the shock devastated him.
Two years later, aged 89, he married again, to social worker Zara Carr, 50, despite his children’s protests.
‘They were concerned for me, but I think it may have been partly financial,’ he said defiantly. ‘ It’s only complicated because I have a bob or two. I don’t think my family particularly wanted me to marry again, for bloody obvious reasons.’
It was an inevitable coda to a career that centred on his sex life, despite a catalogue of plays and films to make any actor proud — including, in his 80s, three Harry Potter films.
At 90, he suffered a stroke which left him unable to act again.
For all his successes, Leslie Phillips will always be remembered as the man with the most suggestive tones in TV and cinema.
That had its compensations. In his 80s, after he worked with Jerry Hall, the supermodel sent him a flirty note declaring how much she wished she could ‘ding his dong’.
That thought never ceased to make him smile with relish and murmur: ‘She’s smashing.’
No one ever said it quite like Leslie Phillips.
‘It taught me a lesson about actresses. Beware, they may bite’