18-05-2025
Peter Wyngarde's wayward life exposes the true cost of being a ‘cult actor'
When one hears the words 'cult actor', one reacts with caution. Such performers tend to be either enigmatic or infuriating. The odd one, however, lives up to the ideal: being a true original, capable of creating something remarkable.
Peter Wyngarde, who died in 2018, unequivocally falls into that category. His biography suggests he was far more bizarre than anyone he played on screen. Since Wyngarde was a serious fantasist, it is hard to pin down exactly who he was or from where he came. One of the few reliable claims he ever made was that he was '50 per cent vegetarian and 100 per cent bisexual'.
In the late 1960s, Wyngarde became hugely famous, in Britain at least. He starred in one of the most enjoyable television series of the era, Department S, and in its less-successful spin-off, Jason King, named after the character he played. In an era of peacockery, he became a leader of fashion, at least for many provincials who seldom set foot in London to discern what was really going on.
It is thought that Wyngarde was born Cyril Goldbert in Marseille, in 1927, though he may have been born in Singapore. His claim that his father was a British diplomat is unsupported by any record, and his mother was not, as he insisted, related to a grand family in France. His father was, in fact, a merchant seaman of Ukrainian heritage, his mother Eurasian.
Wyngarde was in the international settlement in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded in 1941, and he endured four brutal years in an internment camp. This is verified by the testimony of J G Ballard, who was interned alongside him. Wyngarde claimed never to have known Ballard; Ballard recalled him doing amateur dramatics in the camp.
What happened next is unclear. Most probably, Wyngarde, now 18, sailed to England on his liberation and arrived in Liverpool around Christmas 1945. Other accounts have him landing at Southampton, where he was met personally by King George VI; or checking into a Swiss sanatorium to recover his health. In any case, by the late 1940s, he was in England, calling himself Wyngarde, after his real father – Goldbert, he said, had been his stepfather. In fact, Wyngarde senior, a luxury watch dealer who lived in Belgravia, was a figment of the imagination.
Wyngarde managed to get some theatrical roles and from the mid-1950s was a regular on TV. His breakthrough was playing Peter the Painter in the 1960 film The Siege of Sidney Street, and he capitalised on this the following year, playing Peter Quint in The Innocents, an adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.
Throughout the 1960s, Wyngarde was a favourite of Lew Grade's production company ITC and appeared in several of its series – The Saint, The Champions, The Baron and The Prisoner. In 1968, he was given a starring vehicle of his own. Department S was about a unit of Interpol that solved cases no other police force could, thanks to the genius of Jason King – a novelist seconded to the department who used the cases as plots for his fiction.
Wyngarde stood out from his two co-stars, Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols, not merely because of his flamboyant dress and the elaborate hair that made him unrecognisable from previous roles, but also because of his unflappable English-gentleman demeanour. Department S had superb scripts by writers such as Terry Nation and Philip Broadley; Wyngarde got all the best lines.
It ran for 28 episodes. Despite its excellence – or perhaps because of its peculiarly British humour – it did not sell in America, which spelt the end for any ITC production. Yet, luckily for Wyngarde, Lady Grade loved his character, and persuaded her husband to make the spin-off series. Far more lightweight than Department S, and more cheaply made, Jason King saw Wyngarde become an ever-more comic turn. He also, in the words of Cyril Frankel, one of his directors, started to believe his own publicity, and became impossible to work with.
His prosecution for an indecent act at a bus station in 1975 helped derail a once brilliant career, though Wyngarde still found work from time to time until the 1990s. His series are often shown on repeat channels, and if you want a taste of cult, they are unmissable.
