Early Life
He was born Peter Jeremy William Huggins at Berkswell Grange in Berkswell in December 1933, the son of a Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire and an heir of the Cadbury chocolate family. Educated at Eton College, he claimed to have been an "academic disaster," attributing his learning difficulties to dyslexia.
Although he eventually developed precisely honed diction, he was born with "rhotacism," a speech impediment which prevented him from pronouncing the "R" sound correctly. He underwent corrective surgery as a teenager and followed it with years of practising. Much later he claimed that he practised all of his speech exercises daily, whether he was working or not.
However, while at Eton he excelled at singing and was a member of the college choir. He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, graduating in 1954, but his father had demanded that he change his name for the sake of family honour so took his stage name from the label of his first suit, "Brett & Co.".
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