Ron Moody, the actor and comedian, who has died aged 91, was one of the most original comic talents of his post-war stage generation; his best-known performance on stage and screen was as Fagin in Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s musical comedy (1960) from the novel Oliver Twist.
With his height, stooped figure, long, hooked nose, large eyes, lop-sided face, mournful expression, busy, inquisitive manner and India-rubber gait, Moody was unforgettably well cast as Dickens’s villainous old Jew and employer of thieves and pickpockets, and gave a superbly robust, precise and incisive performance.
Among his brilliantly delivered songs were You’ve got to pick a pocket or two and I’m reviewing the situation. After a year as Fagin he reviewed his situation. As a graduate of long-running West End satirical revues, with a gift for impersonation, caricature and satirising issues and icons of the day, he had become – with a single role – a star. The clever new clown with the tragi-comic stance and the larger-than-life technique decided to quit. He never found another part to match its triumph, though he remained in more or less constant employment for the rest of his career in films, on television, in musical comedies of his own devising, and in cabaret. He had been typecast: he could never break the mould.
He was also a graduate of the London School of Economics. “When you have spent five of your formative years thinking and studying in a university, it affects your values. You live your life on a different level,” he said years later. “I don’t consider myself a professional actor. I have failed all my life, and I’m not ashamed of it. After all, what’s so good about success? It is unhealthy. It creates a completely false sense of values.”
Ron Moody with Mark Lester (left) and Jack Wild in Oliver!, 1968
He was born Ronald Moodnick in Tottenham, north London, on January 8 1924 and brought up in what he liked to call “a persecuted atmosphere which made me a bit like a bar of soap. When I’m squeezed I just pop up again instead of melting away.” Ron attended the London School of Economics and, after gaining his BSc (Econ) degree, became a research graduate in Sociology. He intended as a Fabian Socialist to become a lecturer, but, when the first girl he fell in love with turned down his proposal of marriage, he turned at 29 to the professional stage and without training found immediate success in small-scale, satirical musical revue, then still in London fashion.
At a West London fringe theatre, the New Lindsey in Kensington, he made his first appearance in Intimacy at Eight (1952) with a cast including Leslie Crowther and Joan Sims. He played in its sequel, More Intimacy at Eight, a year later and stayed for 500 performances of its West End transfer as Intimacy at 8.30 (Criterion, 1954).
In his next revue, For Amusement Only (Apollo 1956) he clocked up 700 performances. In its sequel, For Adults Only (Strand, 1958), he had two minor triumphs, first as Dylan Thomas comparing notes with Hugh Paddick (as James Dean) from their celestial clouds in a sketch called Over Milk Wood, and then as Pierrot, the mime, at large in London Airport, a favourite role.
Ron Moody in Nobody's Perfect, 1980
In Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical comedy, Candide (Saville, 1959) he created another stir as the lecherous governor of Buenos Aires in his tricorn hat, imprisoning with relish all the less-attractive pilgrims.
It was, however, as Fagin, the Dickensian leader of a gang of Cockney thieves in the musical Oliver! (New, now Albery, 1960) that Moody had the kind of success by which an actor’s art is sometimes immortalised.
He was 36. It made him, overnight, a star. His departure after a year’s run dismayed the author and the management. “Fagin,” he said at the time, “is a very demanding part. I can’t relax for a moment. I use up a lot of nervous and physical energy. But I need a rest. Fagin has done a lot for me. I’ve had film offers, and I think my career has advanced considerably. Now it’s time for me to try something new.”
He began writing a musical comedy of his own, The Great Grimaldi, then accepted an offer to star in a show on Broadway. But he turned that down to get on with his Grimaldi show, now called Joey, Joey, which the Bristol Old Vic staged at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1962 with him in the title role and as the author of the book, lyrics and music.
Of its arrival in the West End (Saville, 1966) the Daily Telegraph’s W A Darlington wrote: “It was clever of Mr Moody to write the whole of Joey, Joey, a musical based on the life of the great clown Joe Grimaldi. In a rather uninspired way book, lyrics and music all served their purpose.
“It was rash of Mr Moody in my view to top off all this quite notable achievement by playing the part of Grimaldi himself. Not that he did it badly. He has a pleasant personality and is by no means a bad actor. Probably he played the part about as well as anybody would who is not a born funny man. Grimaldi was a born funny man.”
Meanwhile Moody, from leaving Oliver!, had appeared, though not to any critical success, in his own BBC television series, Moody in Storeland, and in cameo roles in numerous film comedies including Make Mine Mink, Five Golden Hours, A Pair of Briefs, Summer Holiday, The Mouse on the Moon, Ladies Who Do, Murder Most Foul, Every Day’s a Holiday, San Ferry Ann and The Sandwich Man.
In 1968 the screen version of Oliver! brought him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination as Fagin — honours which led to his first, disenchanted visit to Hollywood — and awards from the Moscow Film Festival and the Variety Club of Great Britain. Within a few months of Joey, Joey closing in the West End Moody discovered respect on the stage again as Captain Hook in Peter Pan which he went on to play at the Scala (1966), Coliseum (1972), Palladium (1975) and London Casino (1977).
He branched out in the classics from time to time. He played in Aristophanes and had more than merely an actor’s hand in a version of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, titled Liz (Marlowe, Canterbury, 1968). He also played Polonius and the First Gravedigger to Keith Michell’s Hamlet (Bankside Globe 1972).
As Mr Sterling in Ian McKellen’s revival of The Clandestine Marriage (Savoy 1975) he found himself acting opposite the much-loved Alastair Sim as Lord Ogelby who, before Moody had left West End revues, had unsuccessfully sued him in 1959 in the High Courts.
Sim’s plaint was that Moody, in a voice-over commercial on television, had imitated Sim’s famous voice so effectively, though anonymously, that whenever Sim dined out his restaurateur would ask if he required Heinz baked beans. For Sim to have been linked with such a promotion of such a product struck Sim as a prostitution of his actor’s art.
The style of the relationship between the two actors in the same theatrical production 15 years later is unrecorded.
Moody also played the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard III in Canada (1978), acted Fagin again in his own production of Oliver! in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1973 and in London at the Aldwych in 1983.
Ron Moody at the Bognor Clowns' Convention in the 1980s
Other stage work apart from cabarets included a self-mocking and slightly aggressive but critically welcomed one-man show, Move Along Sideways (Theatre Royal 1976), which he also played in the US; and his own production of The Showman (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1976) in which he wrote the book, lyrics and music and played the title role.
In the Royal Variety Show (Drury Lane, 1985) he sang I’m reviewing the situation from Oliver!, and took the title role in Leslie Bricusse’s Sherlock Holmes — The Musical (Cambridge, 1989). Of his characterisation of the detective The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer commented that it was “ a jovial vulgarian much given to rant ”.
In 1992 Moody starred in the West End transfer from the King’s Head, Islington, of a revue featuring the music and lyrics of Vivian Ellis, Spread a Little Happiness (Whitehall), but quit rehearsals after differing with the director about his freedom to address the audience as long as he did not make them feel uneasy. During a preview he declared: “You’re a rotten audience.” He was replaced.
Among other film credits were David Copperfield (1969) in which he played Uriah Heep, The Twelve Chairs, Flight of the Doves, Legend of the Werewolf, Spot, Dominique, The Spaceman and King Arthur, The Man with the Deadly Lens and Where is Parsifal? His appearance as Merlin in the Disney production A Kid in King Arthur’s Court brought him to a new, younger audience.
Apart from his own television series, most notably in Moody (1968) with a live audience in the studio, he won approval as Det-Sgt Albert Adams in Hideaway (1986), “funny and relentless but resigned”, as the Daily Telegraph’s Sean Day-Lewis put it, to “a cynical view of the losing battle against crime but really in control”; he had a spell in EastEnders and appeared in Casualty.
Other British television credits included Midnight is a Place, a children’s suspense drama, in which he played a child-murderer and, in America, The Word and Nobody’s Perfect.
Among his books were a novel, The Devil You Don’t (1980), Off the Cuff (1998), which was about public speaking, Very Very Slightly Imperfect (1983), a novel drawn from his disheartening days in Hollywood, and a memoir, A Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography (2011).
From 1974 Moody lived with his elderly mother, his sister, brother-in-law and three nephews in a house in Hornsey. But at the age of 60 he met and, in 1985, married Therese Blackbourn, a Pilates teacher. She survives him with their six children.
Ron Moody, born January 8 1924, died June 11 2015
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