KENNETH WILLIAMS (1926-1988)

Robert Ross recalls the life and career of legendary wit and raconteur Kenneth Williams, whose work with Tony Hancock and the Carry On team guaranteed him comedy immortality…

PAST MASTERS OF COMEDY

With Tony Hancock, Bill Kerr and Sid James in Hancock’s Half Hour;With Hugh Paddick, Kenneth Horne, Betty Marsden and Douglas Smith in Round the Horne

With his relentlessly flared nostrils and elaborately elongated vowels, Kenneth Williams remains a vibrant figure in the armoury of British comedy. While his flamboyant, haughty, face-pulling figure of authority is oft-imitated, as an actor Williams had a deep appreciation of the social caricature. He would have made a perfect Malvolio in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Williams was an intellectual man and a complex man, but his serious studiousness would invariably lead to an embarrassing fall. Life for him was a joke, and a dirty joke at that!

Kenneth Charles Williams was born to a slight but feisty mother and a burly, hair-cutting father. The old man wanted a beer-swilling rugby player for a son. He got an effete show-off. And Kenneth’s borderline cockney accent was soon eroded by a passion for Coward and Sheridan and Tennyson.

For an actor whose entire career would be lazily labelled as ‘camp’ it is perhaps fitting that Kenneth’s first experience on stage was in drag.

As Princess Angelica in the Lyulph Stanley School production of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, to be precise.

A position as a draftsman with Stanfords, the cartographers, was rudely interrupted by the outbreak of war. Enlistment with Combined Services Entertainment, in Singapore, galvanised Kenneth’s fledgling skill at measured drama and, more to the point, mincing comedy. It was a whirlwind of potboiler plays and pink gins, with an astounding barrack room of comrades including comedian Stanley Baxter, director John Schlesinger and playwright Peter Nichols, who used the experience as the source for Privates on Parade.