Carrying on with gusto

‘When you reach your seventies,’ mused a once successful actor, ‘you either don’t work anymore or you’re Leslie Phillips.’ Indeed Phillips’ career has been, and still is, something of a phenomenon, and not only his career in the theatre. His great secret from childhood onwards has been continual self- reinvention.

Starting life in extreme poverty in Tottenham, he was quite a success at school, especially in plays; he joined Miss Italia Conti’s celebrated acting academy, became a boy actor and then worked in a menial capacity for the top West End management H. M. Tennent’s.

The war intervened. In those class- ridden days having, as a Tennent actor, shed his ‘gorblimey’ accent, Phillips was regarded as officer material and became a lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry. Paralysis of a leg prevented him, to his chagrin, from seeing active service, but he made a more than competent officer.

Post-war he had no particular wish to resume his theatrical career, but poverty forced him to accept H. M. Tennent’s offer of re-employment. Once again steeped in the world of the stage, he made his repertory debut as a very poor Guildenstern in Hamlet (has anyone ever triumphed as Guildenstern?). Many further repertory jobs and tours followed; then typecast as an officer — a comic one — he first heard the intoxicating sound of spontaneous audience laughter.

After this he became a successful West End light comedian and in the earliest and best Carry On films and in the radio programme The Navy Lark he established a persona as the well-known English silly ass with an added sexual sophistication undreamed of by Bertie Wooster.

After Doctor films, television sitcoms and stage comedies including a much revived one called The Man Most Likely To he decided to go for roles with more depth.