by In the early 1970s there weren’t many bigger TV stars than Peter Wyngarde. When he was named the best man in Britain, it is said that after he came to Australia once, he was beaten by 30,000 screaming women.
According to his manager, he was, after Morecambe & Wise, “the most famous and the most paid person” for personal appearances. And his TV character Jason King was so popular that by 1971 it was reported that “more children [had been] Jason was baptized in the last 12 months than ever”.
By all accounts, he should have been a movie star of epic proportions by the 80s. But a cursory look at Peter Wyngarde’s IMDb page after Jason King shows that his once stellar career seemed to be winding down in the late 70s.
Television appearances were few and far between, mostly one-off guest appearances, and his role in the 1980s Flash Gordon film – as Klytus, the leader of Ming the Merciless’s secret police – hid him behind a metal mask. Work seemed so scarce by 1982 that he was living on social security.
At their height, however, Wyngarde – and Jason King – were the epitome of transatlantic glamour. It was not for nothing that the actor was once declared the best male personality in Britain. The King’s sartorial style was out there, even for 1970, and that Zapata-style mustache and those velvet smoking jackets and plum shirts with creams would clearly, many years later, introduce the Austin Powers look, which Mike Myers had an amazing outfit.
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In Division S and later his counterpart Jason King, Wyngarde played a character (in both shows he is a popular author with a scat) that women loved and men loved.
For someone known for globetrotting savoir-faire, then, it seemed a cruel irony that his career was torpedoed by an incident in the men’s toilets in Gloucester Bus Station.
Peter Wyngarde did not address his sexuality at the height of his fame. If anything, he played up his supposed wife. “Why has no woman ever been able to finally tame you?” the actor was asked a question in 1973 by talk show host Russell Harty. “It happened once, long ago,” replied Wyngarde, “but I have a great choice, a great variety.”
Homosexuality may have been partially legal by 1975, but prostitution (ie: cruising for sex in a public toilet) was a practice that the police were still dealing with. In October of that year, Wyngarde under his real name, Cyril Goldbert, was prosecuted for gross indecency. He pleaded guilty, although his lawyer told the judge it was a “mental blackout” caused by excessive drinking. Wyngarde was convicted and fined £75.
He was married, briefly in the early 50s, to actress Dorinda Stevens. However, author Donald Spoto claimed in his biography of actor Alan Bates that Bates and Wyngarde were in a relationship when the two shared an apartment in the 1960s. In later years, he would describe himself as “50% vegetarian, 100% bisexual.”
In the illiberal 70s, however, Wyngarde’s conviction, and all that was revealed about his private life, put pressure on his career, certainly on the small screen. TV and film appearances were sporadic in the years that followed, a Two Ronnies sketch here, a guest role in Doctor Who there.
It was only a long way from the 1960s when he made such a surprise appearance in the horror classic The Innocents with the specter Peter Quint, or his wonderfully louche turn as No.2 in the Prisoner Checkmate episode. His name is attached to some of the most fashionable TV shows of the 60s, from The Avengers to The Champions to The Baron, and he has always been a scene stealer, often bringing something extremely pleasant and charming into the mix. Future Smiths singer Morrissey was such a fan during this period, that he sought out his one-time hero, decades later.
“[His flat is] Edwardian clericalism,” Morrissey wrote in his autobiography, “a tornado of books and paper and swelling pyramids of typescripts, half-finished, half-started. His voice still has a great clarity and sound, his eyes unchanged from that period known as his prime.”
Wyngarde remained bitter that his career was stifled by “small minded people” as he called them, and, although film and television roles were rare, he appeared on chat shows from time to time (interviewed by Simon Dee on a one-off revival of Dee Time in 2002).
He was always a reluctant and thrillingly indiscreet guest, although he rarely revealed much about himself. It was only when the biographies were written after his death in 2018 that most of us discovered how unreliable he was about his own life.
It was rare for traders to reach deaths so often on words like ‘reportedly’, ‘probably’ and ‘allegedly’, so their official history was incomplete. Wyngarde claimed he did not know his age, and always insisted he was born in Marseille, but his death certificate names his place of birth as Singapore.
And the man he claimed to be his father — a diplomat named Henry Wyngarde — never seems to have been there. Likewise, there is no record of Peter at Oxford University, despite the actor stating in various interviews that he studied Law there.
Peter Wyngarde’s television career may have ended in the late 70s, but in many ways he never stopped performing. Interviewed by author Ray Connolly in 1973, the actor said: “As a child it was sometimes difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy.”
Jason King may be the part he will forever be associated with but it was probably the richest, strangest and most enigmatic role that Peter Wyngarde ever played himself.
