Peter Wyngarde - Biography

Biography

He was born Cyril Goldbert in Marseille, France, the son of an English father and a French mother. His father worked for the British Diplomatic Service, and as a result his childhood was spent in a number of different countries. In 1941, while his parents were away in India, he went to stay with a Swiss family in Shanghai. The Japanese Army took over Shanghai's International Settlement on 8 December 1941, and as a British citizen Goldbert was interned in the Lunghua concentration camp on 10 April 1943. Conditions in the camp were sometimes harsh. According to J.G. Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life, "Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde" was a fellow internee at Lunghua Camp and "He was four years older than me...". Ballard was born in November 1930 but according to Lunghwa Camp records compiled in 1943, Goldbert was actually born in 1928. His younger siblings, Adolphe Henry and Marion Simeone, were under Swiss protection and thus exempt from internment.

As a young man he went into acting and from the mid-1950s had various roles acting in feature films, television plays and television series guest appearances. In the late 1960s, he was a regular guest star on many of the popular UK series of the day — many of which were espionage adventure series — including The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron, Sherlock Holmes, The Champions, The Troubleshooters, Love Story, I Spy and The Man In Room 17. He also played the authority figure Number Two in The Prisoner ("Checkmate", 1967). Wyngarde's film work was limited but had impact. In 1961, he made the most of his brief scenes as the leering Peter Quint in Jack Clayton's The Innocents with Deborah Kerr and Pamela Franklin. The following year he starred in the occult thriller Night of the Eagle.

Wyngarde became a British household name through his starring role in the espionage series Department S (1969). His Jason King character often got the girl and as she is about to kiss him, he manages to avoid it, much to the annoyance of co-actor Joel Fabiani. After that series ended, his character, the suave womaniser Jason King, was spun off into a new action espionage series entitled Jason King (1971), which ran for one season (26 one-hour episodes). The quirky series was sold overseas and Wyngarde briefly became an international celebrity, memorably being mobbed by female fans in Australia.

In 1975, he was arrested and convicted for an act of "gross indecency" in the toilets of Gloucester Bus Station, which followed an arrest and caution for similar activities in the toilets at Kennedy Gardens in Birmingham the previous year. After the first incident, Wyngarde was interviewed for the News of the World and the Birmingham-based Sunday Mercury, and asserted that the arrest was due to a misunderstanding; in his defence after the second incident he claimed he had suffered a "mental aberration". Although it affected his image, particularly with his audience who largely identified him as ladies' man Jason King, Wyngarde's homosexuality was actually well known in acting circles, where he was known by the nickname of "Petunia Winegum". From 1956, he had a ten-year-long relationship with fellow actor Alan Bates.

After losing his TV celebrity status, Wyngarde worked in Austria, acting and directing at the English Theatre in Vienna, and also in South Africa and Germany. He landed the role of General Klytus in the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon, though his face was hidden behind a mask for the part. His distinctive voice is clearly recognisable in the film.

In 1983, he appeared in the thriller Underground opposite Raymond Burr at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto and at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London. During the 1980s and 1990s he made a number of TV appearances, including the Doctor Who serial Planet of Fire (1984), Hammer House of Mystery & Suspense (1984), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994) and the film Tank Malling (1989).

In recent years he has been a regular guest at Memorabilia, a cult, science fiction and sporting memorabilia fair at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. His most recent television appearance was as a guest of Simon Dee in the Channel Four one-off revival of his chat show Dee Time in 2003. In 2007, Wyngarde participated in recording featurettes for a reissue of The Prisoner on DVD, including a mock interview segment titled "The Pink Prisoner"; this material was released in the Prisoner DVD set issued in the UK in 2007 and in North America on both DVD and Blu-ray in October 2009.

A number of published references state that Wyngarde's real name is Cyril Louis (or Lovis) Goldbert. However, the now-defunct Hellfire Club official website described this as a myth that developed from his jokingly giving his uncle's name, Louis Jouvet, in an interview in the 1970s.