Geraldine McEwan,
Elizabeth Taylor,
Helen Bourne,
Judy Parfitt,
Elaine Barrie,
Michael Sheen,
Felicity Kendal,
Ian Holm
Active: '60s, '70s, '80s
Genres: Spoken Word
Instrument: Celebrity
Biography
In Great Britain, Peter Wyngarde was one of the most well-known television actors of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly for his role as detective Jason King in Department S. American viewers may be more familiar with him as one of the many actors who played the role of No. 2 in The Prisoner. Wyngarde's phenomenal popularity generated interest from RCA in an album, despite the ready confession of the actor himself that he could not sing. Rather than take a crack at Frank Sinatra songs or (as William Shatner had done) "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," Wyngarde took advantage of RCA's offer of creative freedom to concoct a bizarre suite, combining dialogue, peppy late-'60s easy listening music, and a bit of song.
The loose narrative of the album, titled When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head, is centered around sonorously spoken lyrics about seductive situations, set against a musical backdrop. RCA, however, probably didn't bargain on cuts like "Rape," with Wyngarde barking the title like a guard dog and dispassionately explaining the differences between rapes in different languages and cultures. There was also a poem about "The Hippie and the Skinhead," fumbling attempts at crooning vocals like "La Ronde De L'Amour," and even a psychedelic-folkie-MOR treatment of "Widdecome Fair." The result was wholly uncommercial with a high camp quotient. This inevitably made it into a coveted collector's item by the 1990s, when it was allegedly commanding a few hundred pounds for original copies. You, the poor working stiff unwilling to part with your week's paycheck, don't have to jump over that hurdle anymore, as it was reissued on CD (with historical liner notes) in 1998. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
Career Highlights: The Innocents, Night of the Eagle, The Siege of Sidney Street
First Major Screen Credit: The Siege of Sidney Street (1960)
Biography
Fans of the Austin Powers movies take note -- your favorite satirical character had a direct source: master spy Jason King as played by Peter Wyngarde. The stage, television, and movie veteran, whose work goes back to the 1940s, has played a multitude of roles in a vast range of works, but has found only one such part that ever took with the public -- that of the foppish author, investigator, and counter spy Jason King, first in the series Department S and then in his own series, Jason King. The glib, rakish King spent two seasons helping to solve mysteries and save the free world while juggling an array of women.
Born Cyril Lewis Goldbert in Marseilles in 1933, Wyngarde had a French mother and an English father who was in the diplomatic service. As the son of a diplomat, Wyngarde spent his childhood moving around the world. The turning point in his early life came in 1941, when he was left in the care of another family in Shanghai just as the Japanese captured the city; he spent four brutal years in the Lung-Hai prison camp and more than a year recovering after the British liberated him. Wyngarde tried to accede to his parents' wishes by attending university, but instead he was drawn to acting. As early as 1946, he had small roles in touring productions, and in the second half of the 1940s, he worked in such plays as Macbeth (with Peggy Mount and Frank Woodfield), Deep Are the Roots, and The Winslow Boy.
Wyngarde's movie and television careers were as uneven as his stage career was busy and crowded. After a promising start, much of his work in the Spanish-shot epic Alexander the Great (1956) was cut from the final release print. Wyngarde managed to get a role in the short-lived television series Epilogue to Capricorn at the end of the 1950s, but it was the stage that kept him most busy. His New York stage debut came in 1959, in the award-winning Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh. Exposure from the play earned him various one-off television appearances. Wyngarde was very circumspect about his movie work after Alexander the Great, but among the films he did do in the 1960s were The Siege of Sidney Street (1960, based on the same incident that inspired the shoot-out at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934]), produced by Monty Berman; Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961); and Sidney Hayers' Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962). Among the more widely seen of his television appearances from the mid-'60s was his work in The Avengers episode "Epic," in which Wyngarde played an insane silent-era movie director who kidnaps Mrs. Emma Peel.
Lightning finally struck for Wyngarde in 1969 when he was cast in the ITC television series Department S, (produced by Monty Berman) in the role of Jason King, a well-spoken, sardonic, randy mystery author who works for a top-secret Interpol investigative unit. Sporting long hair and a flamboyant moustache, and clad in an array of late '60s/Swinging London-style cravats, ruffled shirts, crushed velvet outfits, kaftans, etc., Wyngarde was a veritable peacock. The character's eccentric mannerisms, coupled with his look, soon made Wyngarde the star of the show, eclipsing his two co-stars, Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols; indeed, many viewers felt that Wyngarde's character dressed more flashily than Nicols' character did. When looked at today, Jason King's manner of dress, coupled with his fierce sex drive and even the occasional use of such period terms as "groovy" makes him the very obvious model for Austin Powers. That went double in the series that was spun out of Department S, simply called Jason King, in which he operated solo but worked from bed-to-bed with a succession of women in seemingly every episode, keeping up a pace that even Sean Connery's James Bond would have had a hard time matching.
Jason King lasted a single season, but it became something of a pop-culture phenomenon and also an albatross around Wyngarde's neck. He was a heartthrob for lots of women viewers -- especially British housewives -- but he was never able to get another series. He was too closely identified with the role of Jason King; even in the mid-'70s, years after the show aired, his name turned up as part of a gag in a Monty Python sketch, in which lunch with Peter Wyngarde is part of a prize in a contest aimed at housewives. He returned to the stage, where he was as busy as ever, and his work continued to be diverse, including a major success in Butley. He made some film appearances as well, but didn't return to series television until the mid-'80s, when he played the villain in a four-part Doctor Who story, "Planet of Fire." The production of the Austin Powers movies, however, and the reissue of Department S on DVD in England and Australia ensured that the character of Jason King would not soon be forgotten, even as Wyngarde headed toward his seventh decade as an actor. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Peter Paul Wyngarde
23 August 1933 (1933-08-23)(age 76) Marseille, France
Occupation
Film, television actor
Years active
1953-1994
Peter Paul Wyngarde (born 23 August 1933) is an Anglo-French actor best known for playing the character Jason King, a bestselling novelist turned sleuth, in two British television series in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Department S (1969–1970) and Jason King (1971–1972).
He was born in Marseille, France, the son of an English father and a French mother. His father worked for the British Diplomatic Service, and as a result his childhood was spent in a number of different countries. In 1941, while his parents were away in India, he went to stay with a Swiss family in Shanghai. When the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the city, they were captured and placed in the Lunghuaconcentration camp. Conditions in the camp were sometimes harsh. On one occasion Peter had both his feet broken and spent two weeks in solitary confinement after being caught taking messages between camp huts. According to J. G. Ballard's recently published biography Miracles of Life, "Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde" was a fellow internee at Lunghua Camp and "He was four years older than me...". Ballard was born in November 1930 so this would place Wyngarde's birth year as 1926.
As a young man he went into acting and from the mid-1950s had various roles acting in feature films, television plays and television series guest appearances. In the late 1960s, he was a regular guest star on many of the popular UK series of the day — many of which were espionage adventure series — including The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron, The Champions, The Troubleshooters, Love Story, I Spy and The Man In Room 17. He also played the rotating guest-star role of the villainous Number Two in the episode "Checkmate" of the cult series The Prisoner. Wyngarde's film work was limited but had a great impact. In 1961, he made the most of his brief scenes as the leering Peter Quint in Jack Clayton's The Innocents opposite Deborah Kerr and Pamela Franklin. The following year he starred in the effective occult thriller Night of the Eagle.
Wyngarde became a British household name through his starring role in the espionage series Department S (1969). His Jason King character often got the girl and as she is about to kiss him, he manages to avoid it, much to the annoyance of co-actor Joel Fabiani who must have known Wyngarde had no interest in women. After that series ended, his character, the suave womaniser Jason King, was spun-off into a new action espionage series entitled Jason King (1971), which ran for one season (26 one-hour episodes). The quirky series was sold overseas and Wyngarde briefly became an international celebrity, memorably being mobbed by adoring female fans in Australia.
In 1975, he was arrested and convicted for an act of "gross indecency" with a truck driver in the toilets of Gloucester bus station. His homosexuality was well known in acting circles, where he was known as Petunia Winegum[1], because of a ten-year-long relationship he had from 1956 with fellow actor Alan Bates.[2][3]
After losing his TV celebrity status, Wyngarde worked in Austria, acting and directing at the English Theatre in Vienna, and in South Africa and Germany. He also landed the role of General Klytus in the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon, though Wyngarde's face was hidden behind a mask for the part.
In recent years he has been a regular guest at Memorabilia, a cult, science fiction and sporting memorabilia fair at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England.[citation needed] His most recent television appearance was as a guest of Simon Dee in the Channel Four one-off revival of his chat show Dee Time in 2003.
A number of published references state that Wyngarde's real name is Cyril Louis (or Lovis) Goldbert.[5][6][7][8][9] However, the now-defunct Hellfire Club official website described this as a myth that developed from his jokingly giving his uncle's name, Louis Jouvet, in an interview in the 1970s.[10]
In other media
In the X-Men comics, the character of Jason Wyngarde (aka Mastermind) was partially inspired by Jason King and Peter Wyngarde. Mastermind had first appeared in the 1960s, but took on the appearance and identity of Jason Wyngarde in the build-up to the X-Men's first confrontation with the Hellfire Club in the late 1970s. Wyngarde had played the leader of another Hellfire club in "A Touch of Brimstone", an episode of the popular TV series The Avengers starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg who appeared in a leather costume that Jean Grey would adopt as the Hellfire Club's Black Queen[1].
Mike Myers' comic creation the 1960s spy Austin Powers also draws upon the Jason King persona, particularly as to his foppish wardrobe and penchant for frilly cuffs.[citation needed]
West End producerMarc Sinden, interviewed in the Daily Mail in 1994 said: "Truth was, in the mid-70s, just after I left drama school, I based my 'look' on Jason King - hell, I even smoked the same cigarettes as him! They were Sobranie Imperials and incredibly hard to find, so I used to get them delivered to me by Fortnum & Mason. Then in 1983 I co-starred in a play with Peter Wyngarde and Raymond Burr. It was called Underground and we were in the West End after touring the UK and Canada. Peter wrote a filthy inscription to me on a packet of my Sobranies and we have been friends ever since. He still has incredible style."[11]
Music
In 1970, Wyngarde recorded an album for RCA Victor entitled simply Peter Wyngarde and a single, "La Ronde De L'Amour / The Way I Cry Over You". The album was reissued on CD as When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. Unusually, Wyngarde did not deliver a set of easy listening standards but a most unusual collection of spoken word / musical arrangements.
The LP is believed to have been quickly withdrawn after its release, but has gained cult status in the intervening years due to a CD reissue on RPM records in the late 1990s.[12] Selections are often played on XM Radio's Internet-only retro-lounge channel 79, On the Rocks. On 13 February 2009 on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, singer Morrissey presented Ross with a signed copy of the album.
