Versatile entertainer who was half of Kit and The Widow
Kit Hesketh-Harvey 1957-2023
Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who has died aged 65, wrote the screenplay for Maurice, the Merchant Ivory film that launched Hugh Grant’s career. He also wrote librettos, stage musicals, TV sitcoms and novels, and appeared on radio panel shows. But he was perhaps best known for Kit and The Widow, said The Times, a camply comic cabaret act in the spirit of Tom Lehrer and Flanders and Swann, in which he sang witty, “brilliantly crafted” songs accompanied by Richard Sisson on the piano. Its success took the duo from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End to private shows in grand houses. Prince Charles was among the act’s many fans.
Christopher John Hesketh-Harvey was born in 1957 in what is now Malawi (then Nyasaland), where his father was district commissioner. One of his sisters is the journalist Sarah Sands. Music was in his family – his grandmother had been an opera singer – and he was sent back to England to be a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral Choir School. He went from there to Tonbridge School, before winning a place at Clare College, Cambridge, where he read English, was a choral scholar under the composer John Rutter, and joined Footlights, with the likes of Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson. After graduating in 1978, he spent five years producing arts programmes for the BBC, before writing Maurice (1987), based on the E.M. Forster novel. He studied under Stephen Sondheim, when the latter was a visiting professor at Oxford; and in 1988, he co-wrote the musical Orlando, which won the Vivien Ellis Prize.
He and Sisson had started working on Kit and The Widow in 1982; they were nominated for three Olivier awards; had their own BBC radio shows, plus two TV specials on Channel 4; and toured extensively, making their final public appearance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011. Hesketh-Harvey had a column in Country Life, said The Daily Telegraph; was a regular on Radio 4’s Just a Minute; translated operas for the Royal Opera House, the ENO and others; and wrote for the BBC’s The Vicar of Dibley. He also appeared in several pantomimes – a genre he loved. “It’s the child’s first experience of the theatre, generally,” he told the Break Out Culture podcast. “And it’s the first time you can grab a child by the metaphorical collar and say, ‘Look, this isn’t a video game. This isn’t a film. This isn’t telly. This is something much more exciting called theatre.’” He had married the actress Catherine Rabett, with whom he had two children, in 1986. They divorced in 2021.