RonMoody
BORN TOTTENHAM, LONDON, JANUARY 8, 1924. DIED LONDON, JUNE 11, 2015, AGED 91
ALTHOUGH CONSIDERED one of the most original comic talents of his era, Ron Moody saw himself more as a writer and composer. But it was his quixotic portrayal of Fagin in Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which remains his enduring image.
He was initially sceptical about taking on such an unremittingly antisemitic role. In his novel, Dickens’s eminence grise was a purveyor of child pickpockets, a reprobate who ultimately faces the gallows. Moody was horrified at Alec Guinness’s 1948 performance in Oliver Twist, with the Holocaust still vivid in memory. “Bart is as Jewish as I am and we both felt an obligation to get Fagin away from a viciously racial stereotype, and instead make him what he really is — a crazy old Father Christmas gone wrong.”
So Moody thought it out again and his personal success at the London premiere of Oliver! at the New Theatre in 1960, was endorsed by Carol Reed’s 1968 film version, which won him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award. He reprised the role in a 1984 Broadway revival, winning a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. He was also awarded Best Actor at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination in the same category.
“Fate destined me to play Fagin and it was the part of a lifetime,” Moody reflected. Filming Oliver! during the summer of 1967 proved “one of the happiest times of my life”. Further productions included the 1985 Royal Variety Performance before the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Yet Moody’s winning instinct was not to diminish the Jewish stereotype but to enhance it. Down all the literary allusions to unattractive, alien Jewish stereotypes — from Shakespeare to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot — Moody presented a charistmatic version that would make you laugh, with his widebrimmed hat, his quirky mannerisms and awkward balletic movements. In both play and film Fagin’s world does not end on the gallows but shows him disappearing into some eternal Chasidic medley of song and dance, with his lugubrious face and endearing clumsiness. While portraying the character, Moody often irritated Bart and the rest of the cast by changing his lines, but perhaps that was what made his performance so fluid.
Ron Moody was the son of Kate née Ogus, a Lithuanian Jew, and Bernard Moodnick, a Russian Jew who worked as a studio executive. Brought up in what he described as a “persecuted atmosphere which made me a bit like a bar of soap”, the young Ron could describe himself as “100 per cent Jewish — totally kosher!”.
He legally changed his surname to Moody in 1930. Educated at Southgate County School, then a grammar school, he studied at the London School of
Ron Moody: unsurpassed as Fagin in Lionel Bart’s musical Economics, gaining his BSc (Econ) and became a research graduate in sociology, opting to become a lecturer. However, when his first love rejected his marriage proposal, he turned to the professional stage at the age of 21. But the real trigger was his successful role in a student revue at the LSE. During the Second World War Moody became a radar technician with the Royal Air Force. In 1952 he appeared in Intimacy at Eight, starring Leslie Crowther and Joan Sims in a West London fringe theatre. This was followed by a sequel that clocked up 500 performances before transferring as Intimacy at 8.30 to the Criterion. In For Adults Only, at the Strand in 1958, he played Dylan Thomas on a celestial cloud, talking to James Dean, played by Hugh Paddick.
Moody married Pilates teacher Therese Blackbourn in 1985 and they had six children. In 1962, he starred in his own musical comedy, Joey, Joey, based on the life of the clown Joe Grimaldi, in the Theatre Royal Bristol, which transferred to the the West End in 1966. Moody performed Shakespeare and Aristophanes, while TV and film credits included David Copperfield in 1969, in which he played Uriah Heep. and his TV series, Moody in Storeland.
His desire for recognition as a writer and composer resulted in a novel and a memoir, published in 2010. He portrayed Prime Minister Rupert Mountjoy in The Mouse on the Moon, a 1963 comedy, co-starring Margaret Rutherford, and featured in a Miss Marple film, Murder Most Foul. Moody also portrayed the French mime artist The Great Orlando, in Cliff Richard’s 1963 film Summer Holiday. But he would come to regret turning down the part of Doctor Who.
Several Fagin songs entered musical folklore, but the quality of the Oliver! team itself inhibited him from accepting less appealing offers. Considering himself typecast as a one-show actor, he felt shunned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and believed he was more appreciated in the USA. But showbiz kept him in regular employment. He is survived by Therese and their six children.