Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore was an English actor, comedian, musician and composer. He first came to prominence in the UK as a leading figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s. He was one of the four writer-performers in the groundbreaking satirical comedy revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960 to 1964. With another member of that team, Peter Cook, Moore collaborated on the BBC television series Not Only... But Also from 1965 to 1970. In their popular double act, Moore's buffoonery contrasted with Cook's deadpan monologues. They jointly received the 1966 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance and worked together on other projects, such as the hit film Bedazzled and the Derek and Clive series of comedy albums. Moore and Cook ceased working together regularly after 1978, by which time Moore had settled in Los Angeles, California to concentrate on his film career.
Following Bedazzled, Moore's work as a comedy film actor was marked by further hit films, particularly Foul Play, 10 and Arthur. For Arthur, Moore was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won a Golden Globe Award. He received a second Golden Globe for his performance in Micki & Maude. Moore was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1987 and was made a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 16 November 2001 in what was his last public appearance.
Early life and education
Moore was born at the original Charing Cross Hospital in central London, the son of Ada Francis, a secretary, and John Moore, a railway electrician from Glasgow.He had an older sister, Barbara. Moore was brought up on the Becontree estate in Dagenham, Essex. He was short at and had club feet that required extensive hospital treatment. This made him the butt of jokes from other children. His right foot responded well to corrective treatment by the time he was six, but his left foot was permanently twisted and his left leg below the knee was withered. He remained self-conscious about this throughout his life.
Moore became a chorister at the age of six. When he was 11 years old, he earned a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, where he took up harpsichord, organ, violin, musical theory and composition. He rapidly developed into a highly talented pianist and organist and was playing the organ at local church weddings by the age of 14. He attended Dagenham County High School, where he received dedicated musical tuition from Peter Cork, who helped him towards his Oxford music scholarship.. Cork was also a composer. Moore kept in touch until the mid-1990s and his letters to Cork were published in 2006.
In 1955 Moore won an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was tutored by the composer Bernard Rose and from where he graduated in 1958. While studying music and composition there, he also performed with Alan Bennett in The Oxford Revue. During his university years, Moore developed a love of jazz music and became an accomplished jazz pianist and composer. He began working with musicians such as John Dankworth and Cleo Laine. In 1960, Moore left Dankworth's band to work on Beyond the Fringe.
Career
Jazz pianist
On leaving Oxford University in 1958 he joined Sir John Dankworth's big band on piano. Subsequently he made a number of recordings leading his own trio including Pete McGurk on bass and Chris Karan on drums.''Beyond the Fringe''
, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford recommended Moore, his jazz bandmate and a rising cabaret talent, to producer Robert Ponsonby, who was putting together a comedy revue entitled Beyond the Fringe. Bassett also chose Jonathan Miller. Moore then recommended Alan Bennett, who in turn suggested Peter Cook.Beyond the Fringe was at the forefront of the 1960s UK satire boom, although the show's original runs in Edinburgh and the provinces in 1960 had had a lukewarm response. When the revue transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London, in a revised production by Donald Albery and William Donaldson, it became a sensation, thanks in some part to a favourable review by Kenneth Tynan. There were also a number of musical items in the show, using Dudley Moore's music, most famously an arrangement of the Colonel Bogey March in the style of Beethoven, which Moore appears unable to bring to an end.
In 1962 the show transferred to the John Golden Theatre in New York, with its original cast. President John F. Kennedy attended a performance on 10 February 1963. The show continued in New York until 1964.
Partnership with Peter Cook
Sir John Dankworth's trumpeter, Ron Simmonds, remembered the duo playing in the intervals of the band's saturday night residency at the Marquee Club in 1961.When Moore returned to the UK he was offered his own series on the BBC, Not Only... But Also. It was commissioned specifically as a vehicle for Moore, but when he invited Peter Cook on as a guest, their comedy partnership was so notable that it became a permanent fixture of the series. Cook and Moore are most remembered for their sketches as two working-class men, Pete and Dud, in macs and cloth caps, commenting on politics and the arts, but they also fashioned a series of one-off characters, usually with Moore in the role of interviewer to one of Cook's upper-class eccentrics.
The pair developed an unorthodox method for scripting the material, using a tape recorder to tape an ad-libbed routine that they would then have transcribed and edited. This would not leave enough time to fully rehearse the script, so they often had a set of cue cards. Moore was famous for "corpsing" so, as the programmes often went out live, Cook would deliberately make him laugh to get an even bigger reaction from the studio audience. The BBC wiped much of the series, though some of the soundtracks have survived. In 1968 Cook and Moore briefly switched to ATV for four one-hour programmes entitled Goodbye Again; however, they were not as critically well-received as the BBC shows.
On film, Moore and Cook appeared in the 1966 British comedy film The Wrong Box, before co-writing and co-starring in Bedazzled with Eleanor Bron. Set in Swinging London of the 1960s, Bedazzled was directed by Stanley Donen. The pair closed the decade with appearances in the ensemble caper film Monte Carlo or Bust and Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, based on the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. In 1968 and 1969 Moore embarked on two solo comedy ventures, firstly in the film 30 is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia and secondly, on stage, for an Anglicised adaptation of Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam at the Globe Theatre in London's West End.
File:Peter Cook Dudley Moore Kraft Music Hall1.jpg|thumb|left|Moore with Peter Cook in 1969. Their success was based on the contrast between Moore's buffoonery and Cook's deadpan monologues.
In the 1970s, the relationship between Moore and Cook became increasingly strained as the latter's alcoholism began affecting his work. In 1971, however, Cook and Moore took sketches from Not Only....But Also and Goodbye Again, together with new material, to create the stage revue Behind the Fridge. This show toured Australia and New Zealand in 1971 and ran in London's west end between 1972 and 1973 before transferring to New York City in 1973, re-titled Good Evening. Cook frequently appeared inebriated, on and off stage. Nonetheless, the show proved very popular and it won Tony and Grammy Awards.
When the Broadway run of Good Evening ended, Moore stayed on in the U.S. to pursue his film acting ambitions in Hollywood, but the pair reunited to host Saturday Night Live on 24 January 1976 during SNL's first season. They performed a number of their classic stage routines, including "One Leg Too Few" and "Frog and Peach", among others, in addition to participating in some skits with the show's ensemble.
It was during the Broadway run of Good Evening that Cook persuaded Moore to take the humour of Pete and Dud further on long-playing records as Derek and Clive. Chris Blackwell circulated bootleg copies to friends in the music business and the popularity of the recording convinced Cook to release it commercially as Derek and Clive . Two further "Derek and Clive" albums, Derek and Clive Come Again and Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam, were later released. The latter was also filmed for a documentary, Derek and Clive Get the Horn. In the film it is clear tensions between the two men were at a breaking point, with Moore at one point walking out of the recording room singing, 'Breaking up is so easy to do.' In 2009, it came to light that, at the time, there were attempts to have them prosecuted under obscenity laws for their "Derek and Clive" comedy recordings.
The last significant appearance for the partnership was in 1978's The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Moore played Dr. Watson to Cook's Sherlock Holmes, as well as three other roles: in drag; as a one-legged man; and at the start and end of the film as a flamboyant and mischievous pianist. He also wrote the film's score. Co-star Terry-Thomas described it as "the most outrageous film I ever appeared in ... there was no magic ... it was bad!". The film was not a success, either critically or financially.
Moore and Cook eventually reunited for the annual American benefit for the homeless, Comic Relief, in 1987, and again in 1989 for a British audience at the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman's Biggest Ball.
Moore was deeply affected by the death of Cook in 1995, and for weeks would regularly telephone Cook's home in London, just to hear his friend's voice on the telephone answering machine. Moore attended Cook's memorial service in London and, at the time, many people who knew him noted that Moore was behaving strangely and attributed it to grief or drinking. In November 1995, Moore teamed up with friend and humorist Martin Lewis in organising a two-day salute to Cook in Los Angeles that Moore co-hosted with Lewis.
In December 2004 the Channel 4 television station in the United Kingdom broadcast Not Only But Always, a TV film dramatising the relationship between Moore and Cook, although most of the attention of the production was directed towards Cook. Around the same time, the relationship between the two was also the subject of a stage play called Pete and Dud: Come Again by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde. For this production Moore is the main subject. Set in a chat-show studio in the 1980s, it concerns Moore's comic and personal relationship with Cook and the directions their careers took after the split of the partnership.