Dudley Morre was born with a club foot and slightly deformed left leg, which required a series of operations for him to be able to walk properly He learnt to play the piano in his childhood home in Dagenham, Essex, becoming good enough to win a scholarship the the Guildhall School of Music at the age of 13. And at school, he fitted the stereotype of using laugher to deflect the bullies, who would otherwise tease him over his height and disability. His musical talents got him into Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1954 on a music scholarship, where he picked up the nickname 'Cuddly Dudley'. And after completing his degree became an accomplished jazz pianist and cabaret entertainer. It was these talents that brought the 5ft 2in performer to the attention of Edinburgh Festival director Robert Ponsonby, who was putting together a show in 1960 to combat the new Fringe festival, which he saw as a threat to the existing arts event. Moore was cast alongside Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in Beyond The Fringe - the show generally acknowledged to have started the 'satire boom' that revolutionised comedy in the Sixties. After the team drifted apart, Pete and Dud stayed together, creating the seminal Not Only . . . But Also in 1965. The cloth-capped idiots, especially, becoming national icons and their sign-off song "Goodbye' became a much-loved signature tune. The pair also starred in movies, most notably Bedazzled, which was written by Cook, and the 1969 version of Spike Milligan's play The Bed-Sitting Room, and took stage shows to Australia and the US. During their long collaboration, they also produced a number of privately recorded dialogues, with obsenely surreal conversations peppered with foul language. Obviously such material could not stay private for long, and Derek and Clive bootlegs were widely circulated, until the pair relented and released the recordings commercially. The partnership eventually dissolved, though, as Moore went to find his way in Hollywood. He got his big break in 1979, when George Segal walked out of Blake Edwards' production of 10 - and Moore stepped in. He sealed his place on the A-list two years later, playing the drunken aristocrat Arthur, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Moore lapped up the Hollywood lifestyle, too. Rumours abounded of Moore's liking for prostitutes and cocaine, and his hard living left him in debt. Even when he began suffering the early stages of the degenerative brain condition that made his last years so painful, observers blamed Dudley's slurred speech and stumblings on drink. His private life was always in turmoil - at odds to his mild-mannered screen persona. He was married four times and in 1994 was arrested over accusations he had abused his girlfriend (and later wife) Nicole Rothschild Moore he never really capitalised on his early solo roles, and appeared in several Tinseltown potboilers, from Best Defense to Santa Claus before his career ground to a halt. His later years were dogged by ill health. Moore underwent open heart surgery and suffered a number of strokes before being diagonsed with progressive supranuclear palsy. When he went public with the diagnosis in 1999, he still managed a joke. "I understand that one person in 100,000 suffers from the disease and and I am also aware that there are 100,000 members of my union, the Screen Actors Guild, who are working every day, he said. "I think, therefore, it is in some way considerate of me that I have taken on the disease for myself, thus protecting the remaining 99,999 members from this fate." |
