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.
January 1998
To Play The King
I think my mother wanted twins you know,” Peter Wyngarde laughs. “That would explain why she called me Peter-Paul”. Whatever the truth behind his claim, Wyngarde certainly leaves you with the impression that even as a child he was a larger than life character. “I was an outrageous little show off!” he says grinning. “A precocious, hideous little child!”
Born in the French town of Marseille in 1933, Wyngarde’s childhood was anything but conventional. At the age of six he found himself a ‘guest’ in Japanese Prisoner of War Camp, and it was here that he discovered the love of performing that has stayed with him since. “I remember the camp doctor: he was a marvellous fellow who would read stories to the children in the camp, Wyngarde recalls of his time in captivity. One was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I was so taken with it that I decided to dramatises it for the monthly camp show.
“In these camps the officers had little garden plots,” he continues. One day I was wandering past the plot outside the commandant’s headquarters, I saw this little rabbit nibbling at some lettuce. As Dr Jekyll tests his experiments on animals first I decided to commandeer this rabbit for my play. So I brought this little rabbit on stage. Unfortunately it was a timid thing and the story required it to go beserk when given the elixir by Dr Jekyll.
“To do this in front of an audience I had to pretend that he’d gone wild. I crouched down behind the table on which I was doing my experiments making terrible noises and throwing up feathers and things… As I was doing all this I looked into the wings and there I saw the commandant yelling and shouting at me and making these awful Japanese noises. He’d recognised his rabbit and was furious.
“At this point in my play I returned the rabbit to the cardboard box I used as a hutch, and then got up from behind the table having become this horrible raving monster that was Mr Hyde,” Wyngarde continues gleefully. “To this day I don’t know if it was because of the Japanese belief in ghosts or what but the commandant looked at me as if I’d gone mad demented and then run away! It was wonderful but the best thing was nobody in the audience knew all this drama was going on backstage.”
Premonitions of success
From this original introduction to the world of acting, Wyngarde went on to become an established stage and screen performer with guest appearances in numerous series and television plays. That all changed in 1969 when he found himself cast in as the hero in an ITC series.
“I remember I was on tour in Wales with an American play called Pick-Up Girl,” Wyngarde says, launching into another anecdote. “I was understudying the lead at the time and I remember I went to see a Welsh clairvoyant with a girlfriend. The first thing this woman said was very strange. She told me there was somebody on my right shoulder looking after me. Now my father had died about a year before and she described him absolutely perfectly, then she said, ‘Very soon you are going to be in front of millions, not hundreds, not thousands but millions – millions and millions of people are going to be watching you.”
To play the fop
Not long after this prediction, Wyngarde found himself appearing at the Duke of York theatre in London in checkoffs The Duel[1]. Shortly before it opened he was approached by producers Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner to appear in the new television series Department S. Wyngarde’s initial reaction was muted
“The last thing on earth I wanted to do was a television series,” he says. “I don’t know why – I’d already done two. One was called Epilogue to Capricorn which is a title I’ve always remembered because I liked it so much. The title didn’t have anything to do with the story we just made it up as we went along. That was tremendous fun, it was a Cliff-hanger you see and you never knew what was going to happen next. Eventually in the penultimate episode I was blown up. By the last episode the audience couldn’t wait to see if I’d survive. Of course I came back wounded and bandaged appropriately – and as attractively – as possible.
“Anyway I was in a bit of a state after the first night of The Duel,” Wyngarde continues. “I remember I’d thrown a party to celebrate the opening and invited Monty Berman. After a first night the newspapers arrive in the early hours with the reviews. I’d learned that reading reviews caused one to change one’s performance, therefore I never read my own reviews. I warned the rest of the cast about this saying, ‘I didn’t want anybody to tell me what the notices are. You can all read them while I go off to the toilet and type myself but when I come back I don’t want to know anything about them.’
A change of heart
“I came back about half an hour later and had never seen such terrible faces,” Wyngarde chuckles. “I didn’t need to read the notices! As it happened it was totally untrue, the notices were actually terribly good, but the cast was so determined not to show they were happy that they had me thining, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to close tomorrow’. There and then I got hold of my napkin and I wrote on it, ‘I PETER WYNGARDE AND PREPARED TO DO YOUR NEW TELEVISION SERIES. SIGNED PETER WYNGARDE. I PASSED IT TO MONTY BERMAN AND THAT’S HOW I GOT THE PART IN DEPARTMENT S.”
Wyngarde had no idea just out important that 14-word napkin was to become. In the meantime, a lot of work still had to be done to create the character of Jason King. Unlike today’s television dramas which are all well scripted in advance, Wyngarde was given carte blanche to invent his own character.
“The original fellow was to be a professor but that wasn’t for me,” he recalls. “So I went to Sevenoaks to stay with friends – Michael Bryant and his wife – for the weekend. I told them that I had to come up with a name for this character. By the end of the weekend I had thought of Jason, Michael’s wife at thought of King, and Michael had come up with the Bentley as the only car this character would be seen in.”
Jason King also became famous for his highly fashionable – if somewhat outrageous – clothes sense. When he stops laughing at the memory, Wyngarde confirms that he himself has to admit responsibility for choosing the coughs, shirts antis worn on screen.
Sex appeal
Whatever you say about his dress sense though, Wyngarde or at least Jason King topped a poll which voted him the man most Australian women would like to lose their virginity to.
“I didn’t know about that at the time of course, Wyngarde says with a chuckle. I’d been asked to launch the new Channel 7 in Australia as apparently I was the most popular character around at the time. When I boarded my plane for Sydney I saw these five guys and it was obvious from the long blond hair and clothes that they were a pop group. I was in my usual torn jeans and tatty old T-shirt -that’s how I normally travelled. After all, if you have to change into suits five times then the last thing you want to wear the rest of the time is a suit. So there I was in this tatty gear hiding behind a pair of dark glasses,” Wyngarde continues. Nobody recognised me. I thought it was wonderful. As we were about to land I looked out of the window and I saw millions of women. I immediately assumed they were waiting for the pop group. I never thought for one moment it had anything to do with me.
“I sat there thinking, those poor little buggers are going to be killed,” he laughs. “I watched them leave the plane and followed a short distance behind. Suddenly I saw these screaming women surge forward. I did a detour thinking they’d continue after the band, but when I looked back they weren’t going for those five guys at all. They were going for me!
“Well they got me to the ground, tore my clothes, cut my hair, and landed me in hospital for three days,” he concludes with the wince. “Everything was cut and I still got a scar to prove it. It was as if I was a feast… to be eaten raw. It was terrifying.”
Going solo
This popularity was a sign of things to come. After 28 episodes of Department S Wyngarde was offered a second series. This time, however, it was to be called simply Jason King, and was to star him alone. However, Wyngarde reveals that one person in particular wasn’t as an enamoured with the character as the public.
“Lew Grade, who was then out of ITC, phoned me up,” Wyngarde explains. “I thought he was going to tell me they were not repeating Department S. When I went to see him he said to me, ‘I don’t like you. My idea of a hero is somebody blond with blue eyes, like Roger Moore. You with your funny dark hair, moustache, and terrible clothes are not my idea of a hero at all, but my wife loves you, so you have to do another series.
“At that point I had no idea they were going to drop Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nichols, my Co-stars in Department S,” he continues. “That was a shock and I objected – I said I wouldn’t do it unless the other two were reinstated. However, it was explained to me that dropping them was mainly a question of expense. I could either have better stories and locations on my own, or the other two back and studio-bound stories.
“So I was really sort of blackmailed because I knew we had to go out on location to make the series work,” Wyngarde argues. “Having said all that, I don’t think the 26 Jason King episodes were as good as the Department S ones they are the better type of story.”
Whither Wyngarde?
Jason King finished its run in May 1972 and was followed by a long period in which the flamboyant actor was sadly missing from television screens, although he did pop up in the 1980 remake of Flash Gordon. This was rectified in 1984 when he accepted the part of Timanov in the Doctor Who story Planet of Fire.
“Somebody said to me you’ve done The Avengers, The Saint, The Prisoner and The Baron, you must do Doctor Who,” Wyngarde says of his decision to return to cult television. I had no idea what Doctor Who about, mainly because I was working a lot and you didn’t get a chance to see much television. I made a point of watching some episodes and found I liked it. The first story I was offered I didn’t do because there was too much studio work, and I hate studio work. However, with Planet of Fire the character was interesting, and there was the idea of going to Lanzarote. You only have to tell me we’re going where the sun is and I am there before I’ve even read the script!
“In fact, the script on this occasion was a bit tricky,” he says. “We changed a lot of the lines – some of them were a bit corny. I found the idea of the story fascinating and that was what appealed to me. Once you have the idea you can take it from there and rewrite the dialogue.”
Wait a minute. Actors rewriting the script? Laughing, Wyngarde explains that this is the reason people don’t employ him.
“Directors are terrified of me when I do rewrites,” he chuckles mischievously. “They think I’m going to take over, and I usually do. I think you have to do that but nobody else thinks so, especially not the directors!”
Interview by Liam-Michael Rudden
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Notes:
[1] In fact, The Duel was staged 22 years after Pick-Up Girl
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 