Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE was an English actor, comedian, musician and composer.
Moore first came to prominence in the UK as one of the four writer-performers in the comedy
revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960, and with one member of that team, Peter Cook, collaborated
on the television series Not Only... But Also. The double act worked on other projects until
the mid-1970s, by which time Moore had settled in Los Angeles to concentrate on his movie
acting. His solo career as a comedy film actor was
heightened by the success of hit Hollywood films, particularly Foul Play, 10 and Arthur.
He received an Oscar nomination for the latter role. He was frequently referred to in the
media as "Cuddly Dudley" or "The Sex Thimble", a reference to both his short stature and
his reputation as a "ladies' man".
Early life Moore was born in the original Charing Cross
Hospital, in central London, the son of Ada Francis, a secretary, and John Moore, a railway
electrician. His father was Scottish, from Glasgow. Moore was brought up in Dagenham,
East London. He was notably short: 5 ft 2.5 in and was born with club feet that required
extensive hospital treatment and, coupled with his diminutive stature, made him the
butt of jokes from other children. His right foot responded well to corrective treatment
and had straightened itself by the time he was six, but his left foot became permanently
twisted and consequently his left leg below the knee was withered. This was something
he remained very self-conscious of throughout his life.
He became a choirboy at the age of six. At age eleven he earned a scholarship to the
Guildhall School of Music at age 11, 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 pipe organ at local church weddings by the age of 14. He attended Dagenham
County High School where he received musical tuition from a dedicated teacher, Peter Cork.
Cork became a friend and confidant to Moore, continuing to correspond with him until 1994.
Moore's musical talent won him an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. While studying
music and composition there, he also performed with Alan Bennett in the Oxford Revue. During
his university years, Moore had developed a love of jazz music and soon became an accomplished
jazz pianist and composer. He began working with such leading musicians as John Dankworth
and Cleo Laine. Bennett then recommended him to a producer
who was putting together Beyond the Fringe, a comedy revue, where he first met his comedic
partner Peter Cook. Beyond the Fringe was at the forefront of the 1960s UK satire boom
and after becoming a huge success in Britain it transferred to the United States, where
it was also a big hit. In 1960, he left Dankworth's band to work on Beyond the Fringe. During
the 1960s he formed the Dudley Moore Trio, with drummer Chris Karan and bassist Pete
McGurk. Following McGurk's suicide in June 1968, Peter Morgan joined the group as his
replacement. Moore's admitted principal musical influences
were Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner. In an interview he recalled the day he finally
mastered Garner's unique left-hand strum and was so excited that he walked around for several
days with his left hand constantly playing that cadence. His early recordings included
"My Blue Heaven", "Lysie Does It", "Poova Nova", "Take Your Time", "Indiana", "Sooz
Blooz", "Baubles, Bangles & Beads", "Sad One for George" and "Autumn Leaves". The trio
performed regularly on British television, made numerous recordings and had a long-running
residency at Peter Cook's London nightclub, the Establishment.
In the 1960s Moore was a close friend of record producer Chris Gunning and played piano on
the 1969 single "Broken Hearted Pirates" which Gunning produced for Simon Dupree and the
Big Sound. Moore composed the soundtracks for the films
Bedazzled, Inadmissible Evidence, Staircase and Six Weeks, among others.
Career Partnership with Peter Cook
After following the Establishment to New York City, Moore returned to the UK and 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 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 by 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"—the programmes often went on live, and Cook would
deliberately make him laugh in order to get an even bigger reaction from the studio audience.
Regrettably, the BBC junked much of the series, though some of the soundtracks have survived.
Moore and Cook co-starred in the film Bedazzled with Eleanor Bron, and also had tours called
Beyond the Fringe and Good Evening. In 2009 it came to light that at the time
three separate British police forces had wanted them to be prosecuted under obscenity laws
for their comedy recordings made during the late 1970s under the pseudonyms Derek and
Clive. Shortly following the last of these, Derek and Clive – Ad Nauseam, Moore made
a break with Cook, whose alcoholism was affecting his work, to concentrate on his film career.
When Moore began to manifest the symptoms of the disease that eventually killed him,
it was at first suspected that he too had a drinking problem. Two of Moore's early starring
roles were the eponymous drunken playboy Arthur and the heavy drinker George Webber in 10.
Later career In the late 1970s, Moore moved to Hollywood,
where he had a supporting role in the hit film Foul Play with Goldie Hawn and Chevy
Chase. The following year saw his break-out role in Blake Edwards's 10, which he followed
up with the film Wholly Moses! The latter was not a major success.
Moore played Watson to Cook's Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Moore was a comic
foil to Sir Henry and played three other roles: one in drag and one as a one-legged man. Moore
also played the piano for the entire score and appears at the start and end of the film
as a flamboyant and mischievous pianist. Moore also scored the film.
In 1981, Moore appeared as the lead in the comedy Arthur, an even bigger hit than 10,
which also starred Liza Minnelli and Sir John Gielgud. It was both commercially and critically
successful; Moore received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor whilst Gielgud won the Best
Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Arthur's stern but compassionate manservant. Moore
lost to Henry Fonda. He did, however, win a Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy.
In 1984, Moore had another hit, starring in the Blake Edwards directed Micki + Maude,
co-starring Amy Irving. This won him another Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy.
His subsequent films, including Arthur 2: On the Rocks, a sequel to the original, and
an animated adaptation of King Kong, were inconsistent in terms of both critical and
commercial reception; Moore eventually disowned the former. In later years, Cook would wind
up Moore by claiming he preferred Arthur 2: On the Rocks to Arthur.
In addition to acting, Moore continued to work as a composer and pianist, writing scores
for a number of films and giving piano concerts, which were highlighted by his popular parodies
of classical favourites. In 1976 he played piano on Larry Norman's album In Another Land,
in particular on the song "The Sun Began to Rain." In addition, Moore collaborated with
the conductor Sir Georg Solti to create the television series, Orchestra!, which was designed
to introduce audiences to the symphony orchestra. He later worked with the American conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas on a similar television series, Concerto!, likewise designed to introduce
audiences to classical music concertos. He also appeared as Ko-Ko in a Jonathan Miller
production of The Mikado in Los Angeles in March 1988.
In 1987, Moore was interviewed for The New York Times by the music critic Rena Fruchter,
herself an accomplished pianist. They became close friends. By 1995, Moore's film career
was on the wane. He was having trouble remembering his lines, a problem he had never previously
encountered. He opted to concentrate on the piano, and enlisted Fruchter as an artistic
partner. They performed as a duo in the U.S. and Australia. However, his disease soon started
to make itself apparent there as well, as his fingers would not always do what he wanted
them to do. Symptoms such as slurred speech and loss of balance were misinterpreted by
the public and the media as a sign of drunkenness. Moore himself was at a loss to explain this.
He moved into Fruchter's family home in New Jersey and stayed there for five years, but
this, however, placed a great strain both on her marriage and her friendship with Moore,
and she later set him up in the house next door.
In the 1990s, Moore also starred as a man named David trying to catch some chickens
in a series of Tesco adverts. He stated in a later interview that this was the highlight
of his career so far, and that he was paid '£20,000 for each advert'.
Moore was deeply affected by the death of Peter Cook in 1995, and for weeks would regularly
telephone Cook's home in London just to get the telephone answering machine and hear his
friend's voice. 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.
Moore was the subject of the British This Is Your Life - for a second time - in March
1987 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at his Venice Beach restaurant; he had previously
been honoured by the programme in December 1972. Moore is the main subject of the play
Pete and Dud: Come Again, by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde. Set in a chat-show studio in
the 1980s, it focuses on Moore's comic and personal relationship with Peter Cook and
how their careers took off after the split of the partnership.
Entrepreneur Moore co-owned a fashionable restaurant in
Venice, California. The restaurant was named 72 Market Street Oyster Bar and Grill. Moore
played the piano in the restaurant whenever he was there.
Personal life Moore was married and divorced four times:
to actresses Suzy Kendall, Tuesday Weld, Brogan Lane, and Nicole Rothschild.
He maintained good relationships with Kendall, Weld and Lane, but expressly forbade Rothschild
to attend his funeral. At the time his illness became apparent, he was going through a difficult
divorce from Rothschild, despite sharing a house in Los Angeles with her and her previous
husband. Moore dated Susan Anton. In 1994, Moore was
arrested after Rothschild claimed he had beaten her before that year's Oscars; she later withdrew
her charges. Illness and death
In September 1997, Moore underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in London, and subsequently
suffered four minor strokes. In June 1998, Nicole Rothschild was reported
to have told an American television show that Moore was "waiting to die" due to a serious
illness, but these reports were denied by Suzy Kendall.
On 30 September 1999, Moore announced that he was suffering from the terminal degenerative
brain disorder progressive supranuclear palsy, some of whose early symptoms were so similar
to intoxication that he had been accused of being drunk, and that the illness had been
diagnosed earlier in the year. He died on 27 March 2002, as a result of pneumonia,
secondary to immobility caused by the palsy, in Plainfield, New Jersey. Rena Fruchter was
holding his hand when he died, and she reported his final words were, "I can hear the music
all around me". Moore was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Fruchter
later wrote a memoir of their relationship. 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 the principal focus of the production was
on Cook. Around the same time the relationship between the two was also the subject of a
stage play called Pete and Dud: Come Again. Honours and awards
In June 2001, Moore was appointed a Commander of the Order of The British Empire. Despite
his deteriorating condition, he attended the ceremony, mute and wheelchair-bound, at Buckingham
Palace to collect his honour. Filmography
Discography UK chart singles
"Goodbye-ee", 1965, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
"The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon", 1965, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
Jazz discography From Beyond The Fringe, 1966
The Dudley Moore Trio, 1969 / London Records PS558)
Dudley Moore plays The Theme from Beyond the Fringe and All That Jazz, 1962
The World of Dudley Moore, The Other Side Of Dudley Moore,
Genuine Dud, The Music of Dudley Moore, TOOFA.14-1/2)
Dudley Down Under, Dudley Moore at the Wavendon Festival,
Smilin' Through – Cleo Laine and Dudley Moore,
Strictly For The Birds b/w Duddley Dell, Strictly For The Birds – Cleo Laine and
Dudley Moore, The Theme From "Beyond The Fringe" and All
That Jazz, Live From an Aircraft Hangar
Songs Without Words, 1991 The First Orchestrations – Dudley Moore
and Richard Rodney Bennett, – played by John Bassett and his Band,
Jazz Jubilee, References
Further reading Dudley Moore. Originals. Arranged as Piano
Solos Transcribed from the Decca L.P. 'The Other Side of Dudley Moore'. Essex Music.
From Fringe to Flying Circus – 'Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960–1980'
– Roger Wilmut, Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1980 Alexander Games. Pete & Dud: An Illustrated
Biography. Andre Deutsch. ISBN 0-233-99642-7. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Dud and Pete
The Dagenham Dialogues. Methuen. ISBN 978-0-413-77347-0. Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde. Pete and Dud:
Come Again. Methuen Drama. ISBN 0-413-77602-6. Dudley Moore, Rena Fruchter, Ebury Press,
2004. Fallen Stars, Julian Upton, Headpress, 2004.
William Cook. One Leg Too Few: The Adventures of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Arrow. ISBN 978-0099559924.
External links
"The Films of Dudley Moore", film clip compilation, 5 minutes
Dudley Moore at the Internet Movie Database Obituary at CNN.com
Radio 4 programme "Affectionately Dudley", 2006