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.
16-22 April, 1969
The Terrifying Past Of Jason King
How Peter Beat The Torturers
Again and again the rifle boats of the Japanese guards smashed down on the little boys bare feet. “Tell us about the bombing,” they hissed between each blow, “or you will never walk again!”
The young Peter Wyngarde, captured when the Japanese army overran the Chinese town of Lung Hua, said nothing. He couldn’t understand the question.
Today, the 40-year old Peter is a successful actor. As Jason King, is the star of the new ATV crime series Department S. But, in a macabre, twisted way, he owes his success to the torture and degradation he suffered in that Japanese hell camp 26 years ago.
He still bears the scars mentally as well as physically and even now, has nightmares which, for sheer horror, outstrip any scene he ever had to play onstage.
The guards shattered both of Peter’s feet before they realised he couldn’t tell them anything. Then they flung him into a cramped cell with a constantly dripping tap within earshot.
There is no escape, except into the realms of a little boy’s fantasy. Alone in the darkness, Peter pretended he was the Prisoner of Zenda. Sometimes he imagined he was not there at all and was a cowboy and riding the Prairie.
For five weeks, as he crouched in his cell, the steady drip of the tap became background music to the world’s great plays with himself, of course, always playing the lead. When he dropped off to sleep, that drip-drip-drip became the applause.
Peter says, “It was only by creating a fantasy world for myself that I could shut out the misery around me. I still do, to some extent.
“Everyone is a schizophrenic. The great thing about being an actor is that you are able to play out your fantasies”.
Peter Wyngarde, son of a diplomat, was only a child when he was taken to the prison camp. Because he was so small, he was used as a messenger between the prisoner’s huts, passing on news with the progress of the war that had been taken down from a secret radio.
He recalls, “It was all ‘Boys Own’ adventure stuff to me and I didn’t really take in the messages, nor did I understand which planes were bombing which cities. But when the Jap’s caught me they wouldn’t believe that and tortured me to get any information I had”.
Afterwards, Peter took his mind off his injuries by reading everything he could get his hands on and most of the books were by Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he wrote his own version of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde and organised a bunch of prisoners to play in it. He, of course, played both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
For the first time he heard what real applause was like, as the prisoners called the boy back onto the rickety bamboo stage for curtain call after curtain call. Except there wasn’t any curtains there.
When he was set free, the boy actor/producer was in a bad way; just a bundle of skin and bone. His parents sent him to sanatorium in Switzerland where he spent several months getting over malnutrition, malaria and the injuries to his feet.
As one executive once said of young Wyngarde: “He seems to live in a life of fantasy or something. I can’t make him out it’s all”
He then started the traditional round of repertory companies. “What can you do?” they demanded. Innocently, Peter would trot out the parts he knew well… The Prisoner Of Zenda, The Merchant Of Venice and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
His first acting job came to nothing and, if you ask him how he came to get it, Wyngarde is frank.
“I think they felt sorry for me,” he says. “At the time I still looked like something out of Belsen. I was a poor actor just a good show off”. He was fired and, dejected, he decided to study law.
Today, it might have been a country solicitor, immersed in the intricacies of wills and testaments but for the fantasies that every now and again would take over his thoughts.
His law books would be forgotten as he acted out the roles of the bewigged, fearless Wyngarde Q.C., cajoling a reluctant jury to the gasps of admiration from the courtroom, nodding curtly to the man he had saved from the gallows before tugging at his gown and sweeping out.
His failure in law made him even more determined to be an actor. First, he set about
improving his frail appearance (“The way I looked, it seemed that only part open to me was Oliver Twist before he asked for more!”). He did regular exercises to build up his physique and slowly the Wyngarde dream world began to assume some sort of reality.
He found success with provincial repertory companies, received rave notices for his Cyrano De Bergerac at the Bristol Old Vic.
He took the West End by storm with Vivien Leigh in Duel of Angels. In America he was acclaimed on Broadway and more and more plum parts came the way of the tortured kid who still suffered from nightmares. Then came his first appearance on British television, first as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, followed by parts in The Saint and The Avengers.
In his present role is Jason King in Department S – a series of 1-hour films being screened by several TV companies – Peter plays a successful thriller writer who solves crimes that have baffled the police. It is a part that fits him as well as his floppy moustache – and it should. That moustache, the bushy sideboards and the flamboyant clothes he wears in the series are the same as Peter wears off camera.
But then there’s a lot of Peter Wyngarde in Jason King. When he plays the part, he is still working off the fantasies which began in the dark days he spent in the Japanese prison camp only now, he’s getting paid for it.
Interviewer Unknown.
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 
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