Moody (and grumpy) the man who’ll be forever Fagin ...
WHEN the musical Oliver! opened in London’s West End on June 30, 1960, one might have expected Ron Moody to be somewhat grateful to the show’s creator Lionel Bart.
As Moody, whose death at the age of 91 was announced yesterday, recalled in his autobiography, there were 17 curtain calls that night, including ‘a great cheer establishing me, in all humility, as the star of the show’.
Without Bart, Moody would never have got to sing such memorable numbers as Reviewing The Situation and Pick A Pocket Or Two. And yet elsewhere in his memoirs, he described Bart as a ‘bloody stupid little b******’ whose ‘tunes were all derivative’.
There was animosity between the two men from the moment Moody first auditioned for the part of the elderly crook Fagin. One of his party pieces was Puccini’s Nessun Dorma and, when he had finished belting out the high notes, Bart walked out of the audition, declaring that he had seen enough.
Thankfully, of course, Moody did eventually get the role and, eight years later, his portrayal of Fagin in the film version of the musical won him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe.
Anyone who has watched the endless Christmas re-runs will find it hard to imagine anyone else as Fagin. And yet Moody only turned professional at 30, following until then a startlingly different career path.
The son of Jewish immigrants who anglicised their name from Moodnick to Moody, he was born in Tottenham, North London, in January 1924 and originally planned to become an economist.
Shortly after the war, and a stint in the RAF, he got an exserviceman’s grant to study at the London School of Economics where his talent for impersonating everyone from George Formby to Greta Garbo soon saw him recruited into numerous student sketch shows.
AFTERgraduating he became the mainstay of many West End revues as both a writer and performer. On one occasion he was thrilled to be offered a chance to write sketches for Frankie Howerd until it became clear that the great comedian had an ulterior motive in inviting him to his West London flat to discuss ideas.
Claiming to have an aching back, Howerd asked Moody if he was ‘any good at massage?’
Moody recalled: ‘ “No,” I said and that was pretty well the end of that. It did not occur to me that my noncommittal answer may have shot down any chance I had of my first big break.’
That break came in March 1960 when, much against Lionel Bart’s wishes, Moody won the part of Fagin and almost immediately began feuding with jazz singer Georgia Brown who played Nancy.
The problem was that Moody, whose Judaism was a central part of his life, was determined to steer the character away from the ‘viciously racial’ anti-Semitic stereotype in the original novel.
Accordingly, he played it for laughs and this did not sit well with Brown who considered herself a serious actress.
‘This witch is fighting me by trying to kill my laughs,’ he wrote in a diary at the time.
According to Moody, Brown’s attempts to get into the role of the abused Nancy meant she was permanently on the brink of hysteria. ‘It makes you feel sorry for Bill Sykes,’ he remarked wryly.
His portrayal of Fagin was also helped by his rewriting of his spoken lines. He was determined to replace ‘the wash of watereddown cockney modernity’ favoured by Bart and return to the sinister floweriness of Dickens’ original dialogue.
‘In the musical, lines like “How d’ya do?” presumed to replace “I hope I shall have the honour of your intimate acquaintance”, so I quietly put Dickens back into my script,’ he admitted.
As Moody’s diaries recalled, his parents had reservations about his role as Fagin. ‘Mum thinks it is dirty. “Why don’t you put on a nice suit and sing a nice song?” she says.’
But in the months after its highly successful opening night, many celebrities of the day went backstage to congratulate the stars – intensifying the rivalry between Moody and Georgia Brown.
‘Judy Garland is in!’ he wrote one night in August 1960. ‘Bart takes her in to see Georgia and not me – the little sod.’
Moody’s frustrations occasionally extended to the ever-chang- ing cast of little boys who played Fagin’s gang members. He did not t ake ki ndly t o being upstaged by them and admitted that during one performance he had given a particularly exuberant Dodger a genuine clip around the ear.
Given the backstage hostilities during Oliver’s theatrical run, Moody was surprised to be cast in the movie version, with Mark Lester as Oliver and Jack Wild as Dodger. He described the filming during 1967 as ‘one of the happiest times of my life’.
‘I was working with such a fine team of people that I turned down quite a few offers afterwards because I thought the people I was working with didn’t come close to those on Oliver! – which i n retrospect was a mistake.’
HISbiggest regret was not t aking up an invitation to become one of the incarnations of Doctor Who, but he did have other screen roles, recently including Edwin Caldecott, an old nemesis of Jim Branning’s in Eastenders.
According to hi s widow Therese, with whom he had six children, he was ‘ singing until the end’ – just like the closing scenes of Oliver.
As those who know and love the film will remember, that’s when Fagin disappears i nto the sunset with Dodger and we say goodbye to surely one of the most disreputable yet loveable rogues ever to menace the silver screen.