Peter Wyngarde

Birth and family backgound

Peter Wyngarde's date and place of birth, his birth name, and his parent's nationalities and occupations are all disputed. His biography at IMDb, which is not supported by any primary sources but often used in other accounts of his life, states he was born Peter Paul Wyngarde on 23 August 1933 at an aunt's home in Marseille, France. It says his British father worked for the British Diplomatic Service, resulting in the family living in various countries, including British Malaya and China. He is claimed to be the nephew of French actor-director Louis Jouvet. Primary sources indicate a likely different birth name, year of birth and family background. There is strong evidence Wyngarde was born as Cyril Louis Goldbert, possibly in Singapore, which is the place of birth Wyngarde gave on a 1960 immigration application, although a 1956 Straits Times article about his mother does give Marseille as his birthplace.

Author J. G. Ballard wrote in his memoir and stated in interviews and private letters that he and his family knew Wyngarde as Cyril Goldbert in Shanghai during World War II.

Regarding Wyngarde's year of birth there is considerable variation. Different sources quote or suggest dates between 1924 and 1933. In a 1993 interview Wyngarde claimed not to know his own age.

The given names of Cyril Goldbert's parents and siblings match those of Peter Wyngarde. His father was Henry Peter "Harry" Goldbert, born in present-day Ukraine and raised in Singapore where his mother ran the Singapore public house, and where he became a naturalised British subject in 1919. He does not appear to have been a diplomat: travel records from the mid-1940s show that he was working as Second Chief Engineer in the British Merchant Navy. Cyril Goldbert's mother was Marcheritta (Madge) Goldbert, nee Ahin, later Macauley, who was a Swiss national. She was interviewed in the Straits Times in 1956 about her son Peter Wyngarde's career, by which time she had remarried. Wyngarde claimed in a 1993 interview that his mother was a racing driver.

The full names of the two younger Goldbert children match those of Peter Wyngarde's purportedly elder siblings: Adolphe (later Henry) Peter "Joe" Goldbert (1930–2011) and Marion Colette Simone Goldbert, later Wells (1932–2012).

As for the claim that Wyngarde is Louis Jouvet's nephew, Jouvet's biography confirms he only had two brothers, neither of whom were related to Cyril Goldbert's parents by blood or marriage.

Early life

Wyngarde told an interviewer that his parents divorced when he was very young, and that his father took him to China "only months before war with China broke out" in the summer of 1937.

In the early 1940s, Cyril Goldbert was living in Shanghai when the Japanese Army took over Shanghai's International Settlement on 8 December 1941, and as a British citizen he was interned in the Lunghua civilian internment camp on 10 April 1943. Peter Wyngarde has spoken about his time in Lunghua, and it is included in his official biography.

After internment, Cyril Goldbert sailed from Shanghai to Southampton in December 1945 on the Cunard White Star Line vessel the Arawa, listed as an 18-year-old passenger. J.G. Ballard was also on board. After arriving in the UK, Cyril Goldbert disappears from public records under that name.

In a Q&A on a fan blog in April 2017, Wyngarde said that he studied in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford for three months, before leaving to work in a London advertising agency.

Acting career: 1940s to 1970s

In 1946, Peter Wyngarde took his first professional roles in theatre productions. Later biographies say that he would have as young as 13 years old at this time, but evidence suggests he was around 19 years old.

An early success was in the part of Morris Albert in a production of Noël Coward's Present Laughter which opened on 7 August 1947 at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham.

From the mid-1950s, Wyngarde had roles in feature films, television plays and television series guest appearances. One of these, a television adaptation of Julien Green's novel South (1959, originally Sud), in which Wyngarde featured in a lead role, is thought to be the earliest television play with an overtly homosexual theme. He appeared as Pausanias opposite Richard Burton in the film Alexander the Great (1956), played a lead role in the film The Siege of Sidney Street (1960), and appeared as Sir Roger Casement in an episode in the Granada Television's On Trial series produced by Peter Wildeblood. Wyngarde's film work was not extensive, but gained attention.

In Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), he had brief (unspeaking) scenes as the leering Peter Quint with Deborah Kerr and Pamela Franklin. He followed this appearance as the lead in the occult thriller Night of the Eagle (US: Burn Witch Burn, 1962). By the late 1960s, Wyngarde was guest starring in television series of the time, many of them were shown internationally, including The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron, The Champions and I Spy. He also appeared in The Prisoner ("Checkmate", 1967) as the authority figure Number Two.

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. 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 fifty-minute episodes). The series led Wyngarde to briefly became an international celebrity, being mobbed by female fans in Australia. A revival in October 1973 of The King and I, featuring Wyngarde in the male lead role, and initially with Sally Ann Howes as Anna, ran for 260 performances at the Adelphi Theatre in London.

Later career

Wyngarde appeared as the masked character Klytus in the film Flash Gordon (1980) and as Sir Robert Knight in the film Tank Malling (1989) with Ray Winstone. He appeared in The Two Ronnies 1984 Christmas Special as Sir Guy in "The Ballad of Snivelling and Grudge and A Film Story". Other TV appearances include Doctor Who (Planet of Fire, 1984), Hammer House of Mystery & Suspense (1984) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994).

In 1983, he acted in the thriller Underground with Raymond Burr at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto, and at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London. After leaving a 1995 stage production of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari mid-performance during previews, Wyngarde has not acted since. He appeared as a guest of Simon Dee in the Channel Four one-off revival of his chat show Dee Time in 2003. In 2007, he participated in recording extras for a box-set of The Prisoner, including a mock interview segment titled "The Pink Prisoner".

In January 2014, he narrated an episode of the BBC's Timeshift documentary strand, How to Be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective. In the 2015 documentary series for Channel Four, It was Alright in the 1960s, Wyngarde expressed his unease at having to don blackface to play a Turkish man in The Saint, but said that he had done it only in the hope that a theatre director might pick him to play Othello.

Latterly, Wyngarde's public appearances are mainly restricted to Memorabilia and other nostalgic events commemorating television programmes.

Music

In 1970, Wyngarde recorded an album for RCA Victor entitled simply Peter Wyngarde, featuring a single, "La Ronde De L'Amour"/"The Way I Cry Over You". The album is a collection of spoken-word/musical arrangements produced by Vic Smith and Hubert Thomas Valverde. A promo single of the track "Rape" (entitled "Peter Wyngarde Commits Rape") was also issued in 1970.

In 1998, the album was reissued on CD by RPM Records, now titled When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. According to Wyngarde himself (quoted in the liner notes of the CD re-issue), prior to the RCA deal, EMI Records had also been interested in cashing in on his fame and suggested issuing an album of him performing a selection of Sinatra songs. However, RCA allowed him carte blanche, assuming that the record would be a failure and could be used by them as a tax loss. However, when the initial pressings quickly sold out and it showed a profit, they declined to press any more copies.

The album is now usually treated as a curiosity because of its unusual spoken-word style and the controversial subject matter of some of the tracks.

Personal life

In the early 1950s, he was married to the actress Dorinda Stevens for 3 years. Wyngarde shared a flat in Earls Terrace, Kensington, with the actor Alan Bates for some years in the 1960s.

In September 1975, Wyngarde was fined £75 (under his real name, Cyril Louis Goldbert) for gross indecency.

Wyngarde battled alcoholism at the height of his career, telling an interviewer in 1993 "I drank myself to a standstill ... I am amazed I am still here", but that he stopped in the early 1980s.

Partial Filmography

Selected Television Appearances