At 60, the age most people start contemplating retirement, Leslie Phillips took the biggest gamble of his life, leaving behind the lounge lizard and “silly ass comedy” roles that had made his name (and fortune) in order to pursue more personally challenging and serious work. The result was a triumphal late flowering of creativity that included roles for Steven Spielberg and the Royal Shakespeare Company, all of which marked him out as one of our most overlooked character actors, a fact recognised when he was awarded an OBE in 1998 and given a CBE in 2008.
Phillips’s reputation for broad comedy had always obscured his serious acting ambitions, belying a theatrical career that goes back to 1935. It was his mother, answering a newspaper advertisement, that saw Phillips accepted at the famous Italia Conti stage school aged 10, launching a career as a child actor that was born more out of economics than desire.
