When Peter Wyngarde was not playing Jason King on television he was living life to the full. “I’m mad about women,” he insisted, even though his relations were not always quite as they seemed. According to a 1970s survey of Australian women, he was the man with whom they would have most liked to have lost their virginity.
Among the most famous of his paramours was Vivien Leigh, “the love of my life”, with whom he appeared in
Duel of Angels in 1960, a stage production that transferred to New York. He told how in the mid-1950s he was summoned by Bette Davis while filming at Pinewood Studios: “From behind a huge plume of smoke I heard her snarl, ‘I hear you have a big cock.’ And with that she handed me a note: ‘Be here at 8.30’.” He allegedly declined.
Wyngarde had a keen appetite for life’s pleasures. There was the Australian who “came very close to making me think that waking up next to her every morning for the rest of my life would be the most marvellous thing in the world”; the girlfriend who insisted that he had her name tattooed on his penis; and the young mother who took him to court for maintenance payments. “The baby was asleep on the girl’s lap; an uglier child I’m yet to see. I picked him up and said, ‘Your honours . . . can you say, with hand on heart, that I could be capable of producing such an unpleasant-looking child?’ ” The judges believed him.
Although elegantly dressed and sporting his character’s Mexican-style moustache, Wyngarde was not the debonair Jason King of the screen. “My problem is that women fall in love with Jason King, but then find that I’m really Dracula,” he said. Nevertheless, there was something of Wyngarde in King: “I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me. I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy.”
King, a thriller writer who solves crimes that have baffled the police, first appeared in ATV’s
Department S in 1969. Such was the smooth-talking detective’s popularity that the character was given his own series two years later. Meanwhile, Jason King suits, which Wyngarde designed with the help of his London tailor, became the sartorial rage. Like James Bond on the big screen, King had a procession of glamorous assistants, including Stephanie Beacham and a 22-year-old Felicity Kendal. “I fell in love with her,” recalled Wyngarde when the series re-emerged on video; Kendall remembered him as “a scream and great fun”.
Yet after
Jason King ended in 1972, Wyngarde’s television career contained little of note. His stock fell further when in 1975 he was fined £75 for gross indecency with a crane driver in a public lavatory at a Gloucester bus station. The defence insisted that he was not homosexual and that he had merely been drunk.
One result of the court appearance was to reveal what was probably his real name: Cyril Louis Goldbert. He was born at an aunt’s house in Marseilles, the son of Henry, an English diplomat, and his French wife, Margarite, probably in 1928, although he was evasive on the subject. He lived in several countries and attended many schools, where he boxed, enjoyed tennis and tried his hand at golf.
He was in the care of a Swiss family in Shanghai when the city fell to the Japanese in 1941. While at Lunghua internment camp a guard caught him running errands for adult prisoners and broke his feet with a rifle butt. He told Hellfire Hall, a fan website, how prisoners could perform plays in the canteen. “So we devised ways of incorporating code words into the scripts,” he said. “For instance, the main character, Macbeth, was always supposed to be Churchill. And some important news event, like the D-Day landings, would become, ‘Our heroes have arrived among the Gauls and taken over Brittany.’ ” He wrote a stage version of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, playing both characters.
After liberation Wyngarde was put on a ship to Liverpool, where he was greeted by George VI. He was so sick from malnutrition and malaria that he spent two years in a Swiss sanitorium. Back in London in 1950 he briefly studied law and had a short-lived job with an advertising agency. However, the stage was beckoning — although his time at Rada with Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole did not last long. “I left because I didn’t think it was the best place to learn quickly,” he said.
Meanwhile, in 1949 he had met Dorinda Stevens, an actress from Southampton. They went on holiday to Sicily and wandered into a church wearing only their bathing costumes. He recalled how “an irate priest materialised from absolutely nowhere and screamed in Italian that he wasn’t holding auditions for a strip act”. Wyngarde persuaded the clergyman to marry them the same day and “all we did for the first year of our marriage was have sex”. They divorced after seven years and he moved in with a new woman. “I was always in love at that time,” he said.
By 1951 he was finding work in repertory theatre. “Mr Peter Wyngarde, as the commanding officer, makes perhaps the strongest impression,” wrote a
Timescritic of his appearance in
They’ll Arrive Tomorrow, a tale of Middle East politics in June 1952. Four years later he had a small part in the Hollywood epic
Alexander the Great. Little survived to the final cut, although he recalled Richard Burton teaching him to sing in Welsh in their Spanish hotel’s communal shower.
Back in London he was in Brecht’s
The Good Woman of Setzuan at the Royal Court, set his hair alight with a cigarette in
The Merchant of Venice and appeared in BBC plays such as Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities. He was also in
South, probably the first British gay television drama, in 1959, which drew a backlash of homophobic abuse, and gave a memorably ghoulish film performance in
The Innocents (1961).
Most of his work during the 1960s was in television, mainly as a guest in series including
Out of This World with Boris Karloff,
The Avengers,
Doctor Who and
The Prisoner. In 1968 he was in
The Champions, a science-fiction drama devised by Dennis Spooner and Monty Berman, who cast him in
Department S. He also dabbled in music, with a revoltingly seedy album in 1970 entitled
When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head that was withdrawn after only four days. That year he beat Cliff Richard and George Best to be named Britain’s best-dressed man.
Wyngarde’s most successful stage appearance was 260 performances as the King of Siam in
The King and I at the Aldephi Theatre in 1973. To publicise the show he and Sally Ann Howes, his co-star, sailed in costume under Tower Bridge in a small Chinese junk, much to the astonishment of the crew on HMS
Belfast.
After his court appearance Wyngarde’s acting engagements were sporadic. He worked as a Shakespearean actor in South Africa, appeared on stage in Vienna, took part in a short-lived production of
Anastasia in the West End in 1976 and played Klytus, the masked half-man, half-robot, in the 1980 film
Flash Gordon.
Fame did not make Wyngarde rich. He received a standard contract fee for
Jason King and benefited from neither the sales of the shows to the US nor the marketing of the suits, although 56 of them hung in his wardrobe. In 1974 his former male secretary was jailed for defrauding him of nearly £3,000 and eight years later Wyngarde was declared bankrupt and lost his 200-year-old farmhouse in The Camp, an appropriately named Cotswold village. In later years he lived reclusively in Kensington, London, his flat piled high with carrier bags stuffed with memorabilia. For some years he was in a relationship with the actor Sir Alan Bates (
obituary, December 29, 2003).
Wyngarde, known to some in the acting profession as Petunia Winegum, was a keen shooter, even if he did startle regulars at his local club by turning up wearing full combat gear and pink platform shoes. When a neighbour spotted him practising his gun mount at home they summoned the police, who confiscated his firearms. He got them back with the help of the Sportsmans Association, although by this time he had taken up swordsmanship, flourishing his weapon with a flamboyant “En garde!”.
After sex, his greatest passions were clocks and cars. “The faster the better,” he said, probably of the latter. At one time he was determined to learn to fly and own a helicopter. He was on his way to the airfield, “chequebook in hand”, when he spotted one hovering overhead. “All of a sudden, it just fell apart and smashed to the ground in pieces . . . Needless to say, I didn’t buy the helicopter.”
Peter Wyngarde, actor, was probably born on August 23, 1928. He died on January 15, 2018, aged about 89
