Peter Wyngarde began his career as a stage and screen actor in the late 1950s. Perhaps his best-known role was as the sleuth Jason King in the TV show of the same name and its forerunner Department S. Wyngarde later appeared in Flash Gordon and Doctor Who. He has died in London, UK, aged 90
Jason King went from national idol to national joke the day the first narrow lapel was sold in Carnaby Street in 1977. It was for that reason, I was told when attempting to set up an interview, that Peter Wyngarde, the actor who played him, was wary of meeting the press. All we ever talked about was Jason King, the kipper-tied, crushed-velveted, flared-trousered, ridiculous star of ITV’s Seventies detective series Department S. Wyngarde, it was explained to me, was a classical actor of many parts.
‘What a life. What a legend’: tributes paid to cult TV star Peter Wyngarde Read more
Given this warning, and the fact it is about a thousand years since Department S, I hadn’t expected even to recognise Wyngarde. Imagine my surprise, then, when I spot at the other end of the hotel where we are to lunch - Jason King, complete with a scaled-down version of the Zapata moustache, a raw silk shirt and a flash suit. The toll the years have taken (he claims not to know his age but it must be 60-odd) only becomes apparent when he removes his fedora to reveal a dramatic reduction in the bouffant.
‘I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me,’ he says over his dietetically-correct lunch. ‘I was not going to have a superimposed personality. I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy, used to go to the tailor with my designs. And my hair was long because I had been in this Chekhov play, The Duel, at the Duke of York’s.’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Wyngarde (left) playing author and detective Jason King in 1972. Photograph: GTV/ITV/REX/Shutterstock
The pilot of Department S was reshown, firmly within inverted commas, by BBC 2 on August Bank Holiday. A previewer brilliantly described a typical plot as having King drive his Rolls to a country mansion occupied by a mad colonel and mini-skirted daughter, drink a bottle of claret, smoke 50 cigarettes, and flirt with the daughter before arresting everybody. Not every detail is correct, however. Wyngarde points out it was a Bentley, not a Roller, and champagne, not claret.
‘Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself. I drank myself to a standstill. When I think about it now, I am amazed I’m still here,’ he says. (He has not drunk for a decade, since he lost a friendship after a fight he couldn’t remember having.) And was his life as replete with women as King’s? ‘Well, there were so many around on set, we had a marvellous time.’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trailer for Department S, 1969-1970 (via YouTube)
Wyngarde boasts that he is the last of the matinee idols, an incurable romantic. He was married once, briefly, at the age of 22, and had a love affair with Vivien Leigh: wooing women has never been a problem. ‘My problem,’ he says, ‘is that they fall in love with Jason King and find I am really Dracula.’
Is he really Dracula?
‘I am, in a way, very sadistic. There is a sadistic streak in me, but I think women quite like it. You have got to be tough with them, really tough and then they love you for it. Treat them with any amount of charm, that’s how you start - then you throw off the frock coat and put on the bearskin. I love being the caveman. The reason I think I am sadistic is that men have a side that hates their mothers. Having so many women is a revenge against your mother.’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Wyngarde and Janet Blair in the 1962 film Burn, Witch, Burn. Photograph: Archive Photos/American International Pictures/Getty Images
He was taken from his mother when he was tiny. She was, he says, beautiful, a Claudette Colbert lookalike and racing driver, ‘quite a gel and chased by men all over the place’. His father, a diplomat, divorced her and took Peter with him to China only months before war with Japan broke out. While separated from him, Wyngarde was captured and taken to the same internment camp as J. G. Ballard. The alternative explanation for his ‘sadism’ lies there, in Lung-hui. He has an indelible memory of two adults fighting over a quarter inch of ribbon fish.
Back in England, after public school and the briefest period reading law at Oxford, he began acting in rep. By his account, his was a prodigious but unreliable talent. One day, having just seen Rebecca at the cinema, he played the racket-swinging juvenile lead in a drawing-room comedy in the style of a moody Olivier: ‘All the other actors thought I’d gone mad and I was sacked.’ On another occasion, in a Somerset Maugham play, he broke into a popular song of the time ‘A Room with a View’. He was sacked again. Nevertheless, he made it to the West End.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Wyngarde (to the right of Roger Moore) in the The Saint, 1967. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock/GTV archive
His stories, told the long way round, present him as more misunderstood than misunderstanding. He lost the lead in a production of King John by telling the director how he should direct it. In St Joan he insisted that Shaw had missed Joan’s sexuality. Having been promised the title role in the film Alexander the Great, he lost out to Richard Burton and, compensated with a subsidiary part, was left on the cutting room floor when the studio objected to the homo-eroticism of their scene together.
Department S and the spin-off, Jason King, brought Wyngarde all the fame he could want, and then some. Voted by Australian women the man they most wanted an affair with, he arrived at Sydney airport in 1970 and was mobbed. ‘It was one of the most terrifying experiences I can remember. They got me to the ground, tore my clothes, debagged me and cut my hair off (he points downwards). I was in hospital for three days.’
Feeling he could take the part of Jason King no further, he left after two series. What happened next? Readers with sufficient memory will recall a trivial, but embarrassing, court conviction in 1975, an incident I have agreed not to dwell upon. He says only that it upset him deeply at the time, but that he does not feel it affected his career. In the late 1970s and 1980s his career nevertheless described a steep decline: small parts, small films, panto. He blames type-casting.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Wyngarde And Sally Ann Howes share champagne. Both were appearing in The King And I, 1973. Photograph: Nick Rogers/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
‘In the late 1970s the whole character had gone into a kind of icebox. He was still loved but he was no longer hot. But all the scripts called for Jason King. It was the lack of imagination of producers. And if you’re a perfectionist - horrible expression - which is what I am, producers don’t like it, because they are so mediocre.’
So how does he rate himself? ‘Extremely high. I mean why am I doing it if I don’t think it’s important?’
Wyngarde’s anecdotes not only exhaust my reserves of tape but stretch over two lunches. He is full of the future too. He has just filmed an episode of Granada’s Sherlock Holmes (his cameo was enthusiastically applauded when it was shown last month as part of the National Film Theatre’s Holmes season) and he wants to direct.
‘Someone said, ‘It’s so sad about you, Peter - if only you had said ‘yes’ more often’, he tells me over lunch number one. Peter Hall apparently once complained that Wyngarde ‘was not a company man’. I have no idea whether this is the real reason for his fall. And, likeable though he is, I doubt if Peter will ever be quite honest enough with himself to discover the true cause either.
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Jason King with his '70s sideburns, bouffant hair and bushy moustache was the only TV detective who sipped vintage port while catching villains.
Often dressed in a head- turning silk suit and cravat he would down large portions of alcohol at the wheel of a posh Bentley as he chased the bad guys.
Small wonder then that Mike Myers based his hugely successful spoof spy Austen Powers on the moustached sleuth who could seduce continental beauties at the drop of his felt hat.
King was played by flamboyant Peter Wyngarde and the portrayal won him legions of female fans - he even had his own women's fashion column.
(Image: Daily Herald)
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
For three years while show was on air he was one of the biggest stars on the planet and in Australia was mobbed when he visited.
When he arrived in Sydney Airport in 1971 he was met by an excited crowd of 35,000 fans.
He was crushed when they rushed forward and spent three days in a hospital after suffering concussion.
In the show Department S his Jason King character often got the girl and as she is about to kiss him, he manages to avoid it.
It was a clue perhaps to the secret he hid from his fans.
Beneath the public face of pin up heart throb he was gay but because of public prejudices, reinforced by newspapers, it was kept secret.
Although well-known in showbiz circles by the nickname Petunia Winegum it fell to the police - who enforced decency laws which targeted the homosexual community - to out him.
(Image: Picturegoer)
(Image: Mirrorpix)
In 1975, he was arrested, convicted and fined £75 for an act of "gross indecency" in the toilets of Gloucester Bus Station, which followed an arrest and caution for similar activities in the toilets at Kennedy Gardens in Birmingham the previous year.
After the first incident, Wyngarde was interviewed for the News of the World and the Birmingham-based Sunday Mercury, and asserted that the arrest was due to a misunderstanding; in his defence after the second incident he claimed he had suffered a "mental aberration".
But it was too late.
He was dropped from mainstream acting roles and his career was virtually over.
He said his career was ruined by 'small minded people' following his 1975 arrest.
It was less than 10 years since the government decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men and there was still a stigma attached to same sex relationships.
It was not until 2007 that claims emerged Wyngarde had a relationship with fellow actor Alan Bates during the ten years he had lived with him in the Sixties.
(Image: Getty Images)
(Image: PA)
Following his public exposure in 1975 bit parts followed for Wyngarde - notably as masked character Klytus in the 1980 film Flash Gordon but he did not reach the heights of his previous fame.
In later interviews he talked of how he battled alcoholism telling an interviewer in 1993: "I drank myself to a standstill ... I am amazed I am still here".
Latterly, Wyngarde's public appearances were mainly restricted to nostalgic events commemorating television programmes where he had a cult following.
He died this week at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital aged 90.
