Please note that some of the additional information provided here by the journalist named below may not be accurate, so it should be treated with caution.
18th March, 1972
Peter Wyngarde! Yes, he’s just like Jason King
Peter Wyngarde smells! This fact is constantly broadcast in glossy magazine ads and coy television commercials. It must be the mark of a man’s success that he can afford such risky exposure advertising aftershave or whatever it is. The slightest suggestion of something unsavoury, even it is it is just a gimmicky ploy to catch attention, is enough to send most strong men running – fearing for their image. But Peter Wyngarde can look happy about it. Millions of men would give their all to look, act, sound – and, somebody obviously believes, smell like him because he has the sort of sex appeal they can only dream about. In Australia he was voted The Man Girls Would Most Like To Lose Their Virginity To.
He is staggered by the range of his appeal, especially when it has the sort of frightening repercussions it did in Australia. At Sydney airport he was knocked flat by a horde of 35,000 stampeding females who tore at his clothing and shattered his notorious cool.
He throws up his hands in horror when remembering the Australian incident. In retrospect and now seated causally in his West London living room enjoying herb tea and date cake – it seemed too appalling to be true. “God knows what they were after,” he says rolling his eyes. “I told them not to let anyone know I was coming. I just said, give me a couple of days to get over the flight. You know you look terrible after a 36-hour flight. That was in case anybody might have come.
“Just before we landed I notice this pop group in front of me. When I got off and saw these thousands of people waving and shouting, I thought it was for them, naturally. So I let them go first, I was walking across the tarmac behind them when suddenly this crowd broke the police barriers and came storming across towards us. I’d been doing that stupid thing with a newspaper so I wouldn’t be recognised, you know this!” (He demonstrates behind the marble coffee table peering at me from behind a broadsheet),
If he is surprised by the extent of his appeal, you can believe the shock it’s given the TV moguls who were dubious about his portrayal of Jason King in Department S in the first place. And wanted to drop him. It was too unconventional, too flamboyant and outrageous, just not the usual style of romantic television hero.
“I didn’t have short hair or wear tight trousers,” he explains dryly. But the ratings proved everybody wrong and ATV decided that the next series would be centred upon the character of Jason King and named after him. The first episodes of this series are now being shown.
In many respects there is little difference between Peter Wyngarde and the character that has made him famous. To begin with, there is not a timid green-serge suited dresser looking behind the fabulous wardrobe you see on the box. Off the screen, even if he’s not acting Jason King, he certainly looks like him. He can safely be called a trendy, even if he is the one who starts the trends, with his long wavy brown hair, bushy sideburns and delicious moustache. He is slim, tall and boney-faced with curiously long features and wrinkles under his green eyes. His looks could be called romantically handsome, and he has a passion for exotic clothes velvets and things.
His standard of living might not be quite as grand as Jason King’s, but he is proud of his luxury flat that was originally built for Napoleon. “Not that it’s very important, but it’s nice don’t you think?” The flat is in a square that was part of a complex built in preparation for Napoleon’s invasion, with lots of secret corridors and passageways. It was to house the Emperor’s entourage. Wyngarde’s flat, the Emperor himself.
“Normally it has an Edwardian effect, but today it looks like a Victorian junk shop. The housekeeper is sick,” he explains casting a despairing eye around the perfectly ordered room. The conversation is easily switched back to Jason King. Wyngarde is a good talker.
“I suppose he’s a sort of romantic extension of myself. But I switch off once I’m away from the cameras. I don’t want to get a split personality. Actors so easily becomes schizophrenic”.
There are several reasons for accepting the role in Department S three years ago. He had rejected several offers to do a television series before. Like many actors his list of priorities was theatre before television.
“I was very broke at the time. I hadn’t earned any money because I had been working on a Chekhov play called The Duel which I very badly wanted to do. I’d actually set aside six months to do it and turn things down so I could. It was a personal success but the play was generally loathed. I was very annoyed with the critics, disillusioned, broke as I said and I liked the character of Jason King. So I took it on.”
The characters is based on Ian Fleming. King’s Mark Caine being James Bond and on Wyngarde himself. He dreamed up the names, applied parts of himself where they fitted and literally threw himself into the role, delighting in the old world of fantasy and reality.
Doing this series change the whole perspective on the acting world and its place in it. Whereas he once thought the theatre to be the be all and end all, he began to realise he was more of a film person and was good at it. He lost the rather aloof insular attitude of stage actors towards film and television work, and in spite of the fact that before Department S he had appeared in more than 120 TV plays, he had always regarded himself as a stage actor.
His stage debut was made via a Japanese internment camp in China, law school and a brief career in advertising. He walked into an audition in Brighton, read a scene from a play, and was engaged as an understudy. He moved on the repertory companies in Nottingham, Penge, Canterbury and Colchester and made his first London appearance in rival of Somerset Maugham’s Loaves and Fishes.
His brief spell in Hollywood was disastrous. His role in Alexander the Great was so drastically cut that the fruits of nearly a year’s work was rarely seen. It was a huge disappointment. Thoroughly disenchanted with film making he returned to the theatre in Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh and only ever made three other feature films The Siege of Sidney Street, Night of the Eagle and The Innocents.
Television began to offer a lot of work, like the title role of Will Shakespeare and appearances in plays like As You Like It, Jesus of Nazareth, The Relapse and all the usual series.
He is more sympathetic than most stars to the constant recognition from his fans. “I quite like being smiled at in the street by people I don’t know. I think you have to expect it. I mean, I come into their living rooms nearly every week of the year so of course I’m rather familiar. I smile back.”
Despite the fact that during the past five years he has gone from competent actor to international television star, Peter Wyngarde
doesn’t think he has changed very much. “I’ve been told I haven’t changed since I was at Nottingham Rep.15 years ago. But I suppose that the one big change, that’s in my attitude towards working in television as opposed to theatre.”
His public life has changed substantially. Apart from the constant recognition, the promotional tours and receptions, there are also functions like the Miss World Contest. This year he was invited to be one of the judges and accepted with relish at the prospect of so many beautiful girls.
On the subject of his own sex appeal he has little to say. “I wouldn’t attempt to define it. It would be silly. If I analysed it, it would probably go away. Someone once told me that I had a beautiful voice. So I said right, the first thing to do is forget it. You can’t afford to get self-conscious about things like that. It’s fatal. Do you know what I mean?”
Despite his television success, he has by no means abandoned the theatre. He has plans to play Don Juan. And despite the success of Jason King the womaniser, crime writing and solver, he wouldn’t mind giving the character a little more depth.
“I think I would like him to be a little more politically involved; to have a more cosmopolitan intelligence. I don’t mean politics in the heavy sense of the word, but treated with a satirical humour if he could be allowed to get away with it”.
Regardless of what he does in the future, with or without Jason King, Peter Wyngarde will never be able to give up. And that’s the man Australian girls would most like to go to bed with. He’ll always be remembered for that!
Interviewed by Barbara Toner
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 
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