The enigmatic and scandalous life of 1970s heartthrob Peter Wyngarde
There were few stars as famous as Peter Wyngarde in the 1970s thanks to Jason King, but his career was curtailed by a public scandal
In the early 1970s there were few TV stars bigger than Peter Wyngarde. Once named Britain’s best-dressed male, it’s said that, after arriving in Australia one time, he was mobbed by 30,000 screaming women.
According to his manager, he was, after Morecambe & Wise, “the most requested and highest paid celebrity” for personal appearances. And so popular was his TV character Jason King that it was reported that, by 1971, “more babies [had been] christened Jason during the last 12 months than ever before”.
By all accounts, he should have been a movie star of epic proportions by the 80s. But a cursory look at Peter Wyngarde’s IMDb page after Jason King shows that his once stellar career appeared to falter in the late 70s.
Television appearances were few and far between, and mostly one-off guest turns, while his role in 1980’s Flash Gordon film — as Klytus, the head of Ming the Merciless’ secret police — had him hidden behind a metal mask. Work, it seemed, was so scarce that by 1982 he was living on social security.
At his height, however, Wyngarde — and Jason King — epitomised transatlantic glamour. It wasn’t for nothing that the actor was once declared Britain’s best-dressed male personality. King’s sartorial style was out-there, even for 1970, and that Zapata-styled moustache and those velvet smoking jackets and plum-hued shirts would clearly feed, many years later, into the look of Mike Myers’ extravagantly-attired Austin Powers.
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In Department S and then its spinoff Jason King, Wyngarde was playing a character (in both shows he’s a bestselling author turned jet-setting sleuth) that was lusted after by women and hero-worshipped by men.
For someone synonymous with globetrotting savoir-faire, then, it seemed a cruel irony that his career was torpedoed by an incident in the gents toilets of Gloucester Bus Station.
Peter Wyngarde never addressed his sexuality at the peak of his fame. If anything, he played up his supposed womanising. "Why has no woman ever been finally able to tame you?" the actor was asked in 1973 by chat show host Russell Harty. "It did happen once, a long time ago,” Wyngarde replied, “but I have great choice, great variety."
Homosexuality may have been partly legalised by 1975, but cottaging (ie: cruising for sex in public lavatories) was a practice still pounced on by the police. In the October of that year, Wyngarde was prosecuted under his real name, Cyril Goldbert, for gross indecency. He pleaded guilty, although his solicitor told the judge it was a "mental aberration" brought on by excessive drinking. Wyngarde was convicted and fined £75.
He had been married, briefly in the early 50s, to actress Dorinda Stevens. However, the author Donald Spoto claimed in his biography of the actor Alan Bates that Bates and Wyngarde were in a relationship when the two flat shared in the 1960s. In later years, he would describe himself as “50% vegetarian, 100% bisexual.”
In the illiberal 70s, however, Wyngarde’s conviction, and all that that revealed about his private life, crushed his career, certainly on the small screen. TV and film appearances were sporadic in the years after, a Two Ronnies sketch here, a guest role in Doctor Who there.
It was all a far cry from the 1960s when he made such a scorching impression in the horror classic The Innocents as the spectral Peter Quint, or his memorably louche turn as No.2 in the Prisoner episode Checkmate. His name is attached to some of the 60s’ most fashionable TV shows, from The Avengers to The Champions to The Baron, and he was always a scene-stealer, often bringing something deliciously offbeat and seductive into the mix. Future Smiths vocalist Morrissey became such a fan during this period, that, decades later, he sought out his one-time hero.
“[His flat is] an Edwardian warren of clerical ferocity,” Morrissey wrote in his autobiography, “a tornado of books and papers and swelling pyramids of typescripts, half-finished, half-begun. His voice is still of great clarity and sound, his eyes unchanged since that period known as his prime.”
Wyngarde remained bitter that his career had been stifled by “small minded people” as he called them, and, though film and TV roles were rare, he occasionally popped up on chat shows (he was interviewed by Simon Dee on a one-off revival of Dee Time in 2002).
He was always a droll and thrillingly indiscreet guest, though rarely revealed much about himself. It was only when the obituaries were written after his death in 2018 that most of us found out quite how unreliable he was about his own life.
Rarely have obituarists had to reach for words like ‘reportedly’, ‘probably’ and ‘allegedly’ with such frequency, so incomplete was his official history. Wyngarde claimed not to know his real age, and always insisted he was born in Marseille, yet his death certificate names his place of birth as Singapore.
And the man he claimed was his father — a diplomat named Henry Wyngarde — doesn’t appear to have ever existed. Similarly, there’s no record of Peter at the University of Oxford, despite the actor stating in various interviews that he studied Law there.
Peter Wyngarde’s TV career may have fizzled out in the late 70s, but in many ways he never stopped performing. Interviewed by author Ray Connolly in 1973, the actor said: “As a child it was difficult to differentiate sometimes between fact and fantasy.”
Jason King may be the part he will forever be associated with but the richest and weirdest and most enigmatic role Peter Wyngarde ever played was probably himself.
