This great photo is of Peter Wyngarde, a famous British acter who the Australian blog,The Outland Institute well describes below better than I ever could:
"Jason King – and Peter Wyngarde, the actor who played him – was a major sex symbol of the 1970s. No, seriously, he was. Women would mob him in the streets. I really, truly am not making this up. It’s hard to see exactly why now, but it’s true. He was part of the team on Division S, an Avengers-style spy-caper show at the end of the swinging 60s. Wyngarde’s character was so popular he was given his own eponymous spin-off.
In 1970 Wyngarde was brought to Australia to promote Channel 7. On March 1st he arrived at Sydney Airport to be greeted by 35,000 fans. In Queensland women climbed the outside of a hotel trying to reach his 12th floor balcony, and the hotel maids are reported to have stolen his chest hair while he slept. That last one just sounds made-up, but there you go.
He returned to Australia again in 1972 to similar hysterical scenes, yet these days he is barely remembered. Possibly that’s due to his conviction in 1975 for an act of “gross indecency” with a truck driver in the toilets of a bus station in Gloucester. Yes, the incredibly camp man with the outrageous clothes turned out to be gay – what were the chances of that? To quote Austin Powers – who was reportedly based on the character of Jason King – “I can’t believe Liberace was gay. I mean, women loved him! I didn’t see that one coming”. Wyngarde’s audience turned their back on him and his celebrity faded, although he continued to make sporadic appearances in TV and film (such as Flash Gordon in 1980, and the Doctor Who story Planet Of Fire in 1984). It could be said Wyngarde’s popularity was on the wane anyway, as IMDB doesn’t list any credits for the three years between Jason King ended and his arrest, but it’s interesting to see the effect the court case had on Wyngarde’s career compared to George Michael’s twenty years later."
This guy is the tops. His wit is off the chains but what do you except from a dandy who got both his feet broken as toture alongside, a young J.G. Ballard in a Japanese concentration camp (in Japanese occupied China) during World War 2? Here's a taste of this men's rhetorical flourish:
here
& here
& this wonderfully hilarious clip of Wyngarde discussing British "skinhead" culture and sounding quite like Jeremy Irons doing so (by Skinheads i mean not the neo-Nazi's but the reggea-loving, working class, white British youths reaction to the hippies, aka, the guys with buzz cuts, red suspenders and boots and the girls in the plaid skirts.)
No comments:
Post a Comment