DB7

Leslie Phillips - a rake's progress
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
Leslie Phillips is famous for playing the rogue, leering “Hell-lo” at a foxy nurse. Now, at 80, he wants to be taken seriously, he tells Tim Teeman

The catchphrases are wearing thin — “Ding dong”, “Ah hell-lo”, “Oh, I say” — yet wherever Leslie Phillips goes people beg him to say them. He made only three Carry On films and three Doctor films but the image of the sleazy posh rake stuck, and, as the puddle of fan mail on his living room floor testifies, he joined the pantheon of English comic icons.
He turns 80 on Tuesday and this is not how he wishes to be remembered. “Don’t get me wrong, it pays for this,” he says, indicating his imposing Maida Vale home, bought in 1967. “But I can do more. I want to do more.”

There is a steeliness about him, and beneath that a sweetness and frailty, quite at odds with the frothy, campy lech he played on screen. We sit at angles to each other, frequently assailed by his two Burmese cats, Mr Big and Misha. A magnolia tree blossoms outside. He doesn’t feel 80 he says. “I felt it at 70 — three score years and ten and all that — but I don’t worry about age. I’ve found much more interest and joy in my job as I have got older. ” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the television. “The old films still come out and you can’t get away from them. But I don’t mind, though it used to get on my tits that all these people were making money out of them and I wasn’t.”

Phillips was born and raised in Tottenham, North London. His father Fred made gas cookers, his mother Cecilia took in sewing. “My family was not orientated to Sexy Beast or theatre at all. The big problem was Dad. He was ill all the time. He had rheumatic fever. It affected his heart. My mother was always looking after him but he never gave up. They brought him his work to do on his bed. He couldn’t afford to be ill. We just accepted he was a sick man and that he would go on working to keep us. It was damned hard, especially on my mother. She was so strong.”

His father died when Phillips was 9. “It was very muddling. One hadn’t really come across death at all. We thought he was a sick man and he would go on.”

Just then Angela, his second wife, comes in to the living room. “I’m going swimming. I’ve left a note for the cleaning lady to get her to use this water spray on the ironing.”

“What’s that for?” Phillips asks, eyeing the sprayer.

“To damp it down,” Angela says.

“Damp what down?” Phillips inquires.

“The sheet,” Angela says, smiling indulgently at her husband’s domestic cluelessness.

“The what? You’re talking about ironing. You want me to do it?” he persists.

“No. She’s going to do it. But she won’t be able to get in unless you answer the door,” says Angela firmly but kindly, the arbiter of domestic order, and leaves. Phillips turns back to me. “This is a girl we have to help around the house,” he says, by way of explanation. “She’s lovely.”

He resumes talking about his father. “I saw him in his coffin. In our sort of family you put him in the front room in a casket. That was very worrying. I would look at him and see the changes take place. He wasn’t properly prepared. His face went an extraordinary colour, fungus grew on his ears and nose. All the family trooped around. For a few days it was continuous crying and screaming.”

Phillips became a child actor after his mother saw an advertisement — “Children wanted for Christmas show” — in a newspaper. In fact it was an advertisement for the Italia Conti stage school. “I had no ambition to be an actor. I was very sporty. I started earning when I was 10. My first paypacket was Peter Pan. I didn’t want to go to the audition at first. I had football that morning. But I did a piece from Julius Caesar. I realised I had to get rid of the cockney accent. You couldn’t be an actor and have a regional accent in those days. Of course today you can’t be an actor without one.”

He stayed at school until he was 14, and appeared in plays for the HM Tennant group. He lost his accent, “through association. The lighting man, the carpenter, the prop man — they became my sort of uncles — I was quietly being educated.” He worked with Rex Harrison — “always concerned with himself and whatever lady he was with at the time” — and Vivian Leigh (“lovely”) and Laurence Olivier (“Larry was always coming to the theatre in in his Fleet Air Arm gear”).

During the Blitz, he became a “fireboy” at night, scouring the West End from rooftops to notify the authorities of the locations of the many blazes. He remembers V1 rockets. “If the engines cut out we knew they were coming down and I would jump behind the nearest wall and lie down. And there were bombs on parachutes too that would float down, silently. Horrible. I was a man at 16. I knew about life.”

When Phillips joined up aged 18 his theatre training meant “I looked like a boy from a well-educated family”. He got an officer’s commission in the Royal Artillery, and trained by charging up mountains with live ammunition slung around his back.

He had a far from spiffing war. In 1942 he joined the Durham Light Infantry. “The beginning of my trouble was continuous bombardment and the bangs. It was nerve-wracking with aeroplanes flying over and shooting them down. I used to get a sort of paralysis on the left side of my body. I suppose it was a form of shell-shock. I never really recovered.”

In 1945, just shy of the end of the war, he left the Army. “I went into a place, Woodside Hospital in Muswell Hill, with people who had every known kind of problem. It was a great mess of people who were suffering. To be honest I never thought I’d survive the war. I always thought ‘Any minute now I’ll be bloody killed’ so I was quite surprised to be alive.” His voice becomes shaky and thick. “I wasn’t well by the end of it. I had this problem. I was in charge of men and I could never be quite good enough. You didn’t always want to complain. There were groups of people who were all suffering like you were.”

Did he get back into life easily?

“No I didn’t,” he says quietly, then repeats himself angrily: “No I didn’t. I didn’t know what the bloody hell to do. I had no idea. I never thought of going back to theatre.” He was offered a job, “importing and exporting things in Basra”, but failed the medical. Then, walking along Shaftesbury Avenue he bumped into some old mates from the theatre. He rejoined HM Tennants and began performing again.

A role in Les Girls (1955), a Gene Kelly musical, was his first real break. The Carry Ons began with Carry on Nurse (1958), from which “Ding dong” came. “I did enjoy making the Carry Ons up to a point,” he says, frowning. “But when I realised Peter Rogers (their creator) intended me to be one of the regulars it was goodbye. I didn’t want to be in series of comedies of that sort. I wanted to get back to classical theatre.

“The Doctor films were slightly better. They cost more, had class. But people put you in a mould, and while that signifies success it’s a danger too. I went on to play Falstaff at the RSC and appeared in Empire of the Sun but that thing” — another violent thumb jerk at the TV — “brings you back to your previous life. Those films come out on it every bloody week.”

His love life was tangled. He married his first wife Penelope Bartley in 1948 and they were happy for a time, producing four children, Caroline, Claudia, Andrew and Roger. But Phillips went away to the US to work “and we drifted”. He began an affair with Caroline Mortimer, stepdaughter of Sir John, and Bartley divorced him in 1965. He and Mortimer broke up after nine years — she wanted children, he didn’t — but he maintained contact with Bartley. She suffered a stroke in 1981 and Phillips would carry her from the car into the house for family gatherings. A year later she died in a fire and Phillips married his present wife, Angela, 22 years his junior, whom he had met while working on a play in 1976.

“For a long time, in a twisted way, I thought I should never have married Penny,” he says. “We married because we thought we ought to. But I was still recovering from the war. It was very sad, though I love my children dearly.”

But acting, rather than family, seems to have consistently come first. On his acrimonious divorce from Bartley he says: “It was hell, but with this job it doesn’t matter what happens, it is so powerful you can cope with almost anything because it’s a dedication.”

Phillips insists that in real life he has not played the roué. “I’m asked to play it for laughs. It pays the rent, that’s all. See that lot down there?” He indicates the fan mail. “British people are very affectionate to people they like. They never give you up.” He pauses. “I don’t know if I love it or hate it but it is part of one’s life and one has to cope with it.”

Phillips is certainly a realist. Asked how he would like to be remembered, he answers: “Oh, I wouldn’t expect too much there.” He knows he must court the devil — that screen over his shoulder; “it has to be done” — if he is to make a splash. He has appeared in Tomb Raider and was the voice of the Sorting Hat in the last Harry Potter. He has parts in a new John Malkovich film about a man who pretended to be Stanley Kubrick and a biopic about Churchill, but he wants a primetime role — “a Pride and Prejudice” — to stretch him. “I’m still ambitious,” he says, dead serious.

The year he bought his Maida Vale home (1967) he also bought a finca in Ibiza. This he has finally got round to renovating. It’s cost tens of thousands of pounds but Phillips says it means everything to him to finish it. “I want to enjoy life,” he says. “I had an inherent fear when I watched my mother. She literally had no money. She was mugged when she was 92 and died weeks later. She was at a bus stop and three young boys attacked her. She wouldn’ t let them have her purse. They dragged her along the road. She broke so many bones. She was murdered. It was the first time in her life she had ever been in hospital. My sister Doris, who cared for her, never recovered from it. She had a stroke and died soon after.” The failure of his marriage he counts as the greatest tragedy of his life, the death of his mother “a close second”.

On Tuesday he will hold his family close, celebrate his birthday and toast a role, still to materialise, that could displace “Ding dong” from our memories. “The Government is extending the retirement age,” he ponders, summoning a naughty grin. “Well, that suits me fine.”

Oh I Say: Leslie Phillips at 80 is on Radio 4, Tuesday, at 11.30am

Life and times

April 20, 1924 Born in Tottenham, North London.

1929 Aged 5 starts at the Italia Conti School and makes his stage debut as Peter Pan.

1942 Called up to the Durham Light Infantry.

1945 Invalided out of the Army after a nervous breakdown.

1948 Marries the actress Penelope Bartley with whom he has four children.

1958 Appears in Carry on Nurse as Jack Bell, who utters “Ding dong . . .”

1960 Plays the role of Dr Tony Burke in Doctor in Love. Originates catchphrase: “Well, hell-lo”.

1976 Meets second wife Angela Scoular, whom he marries in 1982.

1987 Plays Maxton in Empire of the Sun.

1998 Appointed OBE.


2001 Plays Wilson in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.


2002 Is the voice for the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.


Katherine Courts

DAVID RAYNER

A very interesting article. But there is, however, an obvious error towards the end of it. Leslie starred with Angela Scoular in DOCTOR IN TROUBLE, released in 1970. So he obviously met her before 1976.

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

Leslie Phillips gave a wonderful performance as the crusty judge in the dramatised documentary called "The Trials of Oz." I was hoping to see him on stage in the play "Gross Indecency" about the trials of Oscar Wilde but he was, unfortunately, indisposed.
One of the more positive aspects of being "type-cast" I suppose is that an actor becomes so because he plays the part so well. The career of George Sanders, the urbane, super-suave rake rather plummetted towards the end of his life when films were being made which largely excluded this sort of character.
I suppose there will always be parts for lecherous, slightly comic old gentlemen in plays and films so Leslie ought to be in demand for years to come!

JamesM

He's in the cast of the new Carry On film (Carry O London)

Steve Crook

Oh please tell me my eyes are deceiving me. But no, it's listed on the IMDb as "Announced" (not yet in production). It (provisionally) includes Paul "Lily Savage" O'Grady as "Charley Gaebody" and Leslie Phillips as Arthur Moment (ho ho).

Didn't they learn their lesson after Carry On Columbus?

Steve

Janice Healey

Why is it that some actors have lots of books written about them eg Sir John Gielgud,
Sir John Mills, Lord Laurence Olivier etc. While other worth while actors and actresses are total ignored yet were interesting characters. Why has nobody written a book on Robert Newton 1905-1952 although he was a bit of a hellraiser

orpheum

There is a website for Robert Newton fans which hints at a biog.If you read biogs of other famous contemporary actors e.g.Niven and Mills he comes bursting out of the book.You just want to know his life story.What turned him to drink and what was the big court case about after his death.The trouble of course is that the majority of his contemporaries are now dead and so this would by and large be a scissors and paste job.What a shame.

NappieB

Leslie Phillips is heard as the narrator on the safety video for transatlantic Virgin Atlantic flights!

Steve Crook

Does he make any jokes about Virgins not going all the way?

Steve