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Leslie Phillips, actor of wide-ranging talent who made a career in comedies including The Navy Lark and the Doctor films – obituary

Leslie Phillips  - Rex Features
Leslie Phillips - Rex Features

Leslie Phillips, the actor and director who has died aged 98, was one of the most successful light comedians in the post-war West End theatre, but he was most enduringly known as the skirt-chasing “silly ass” in the Doctor and Carry On films of the 1960s. Although with his twitching moustache, roving eye, leering looks and air of cheerful mischief, he became a leading exponent of light-hearted lechery, his brand of suave geniality could also strike a sinister note.

In old age he remained in demand for his distinctively languid tones, which became familiar to a new generation when he provided the voice of the magical Sorting Hat of Hogwarts school in several Harry Potter films.

Leslie Phillips in 1957  - Rex Features
Leslie Phillips in 1957 - Rex Features

Although Phillips was a fine actor of limitless range, he was often saddled with the ex-officer image forged in his early film comedies, reinforced further by such catchphrases as “ding-dong!” (delivered rallentando when appraising a pretty girl for the first time), “I sa-a-ay!” (ditto) and “Hell-o!” (ditto again, a mixture of breathy appreciation and lustful anticipation).

Phillips was also a familiar face on television, with roles including the local Mr Fixit opposite John Gielgud in John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease (1989); a judge in The Trials of Oz (1991); Lord Lane in the drama-documentary Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990); appearances in the Chancer series (1990-91) and, a decade later, in Midsomer Murders, Marple and The Catherine Tate Show.

Phillips’ reputation as a comedian rested on a streak of innocence which pervaded his pursuit of young women, and his refusal to be thwarted by mishap. While this naughty talent seldom drew critical sympathy, the wider public responded warmly to Phillips’s silky delineation of the quality – in such successful 1960s stage farces as Boeing-Boeing and The Man Most Likely To… as well in the 1973 film adaptation of John Chapman and Ray Cooney’s Not Now Darling among scores of other films and television series.

Leslie Phillips and Julie Christie in Crooks Anonymous (1962)  - Rex Features
Leslie Phillips and Julie Christie in Crooks Anonymous (1962) - Rex Features

Indeed, so wide was his fame as a would-be seducer on stage and screen that when he came to play the Reverend Andrew Parker, the first incumbent in the 1960s television series Our Man at St Mark’s, the producers could not trust the viewers’ imagination not to stray, and though he acted with due ecclesiastical propriety, for the second series they decided that Donald Sinden would be a safer choice.

Unfashionably delighted to act in long runs, Phillips relished the technical challenge of spending years in the same part, raising laughs from different audiences at each performance.

This was a gift that ranked him among the most reliable and resourceful of “legitimate” comedians from his early days on radio in one of the longest runs of all, The Navy Lark, a series in which he served for 17 years.

Affecting none of the clown’s traditional desire to play Hamlet, or at any rate Shakespeare, he would say: “I could go on for ever in comedy. It gives me a terrific lift. I often think now lucky I am to get this feeling.”

Never the less, he did venture into serious-minded drama. He was in Lindsay Anderson’s revival of The Cherry Orchard (Haymarket, 1983) – and treasured the memory of a telephone call from Laurence Olivier congratulating him on his performance – and in Peter Nichols’s Passion Play (Wyndham’s, 1984): “That’s the role I’m most proud of playing,” he once said. Later he toured – he always enjoyed touring – in Pride and Prejudice.

Phillips appeared in The Navy Lark for most of its 17-year run, ending in 1977 - Rixon/ANL/Shutterstock
Phillips appeared in The Navy Lark for most of its 17-year run, ending in 1977 - Rixon/ANL/Shutterstock

When in 1992 he returned to the West End stage, it was to play, with critical acclaim, an elderly, incontinent and semi-senile American parent and forgotten poet in Painting Churches (Playhouse).

His trademark moustache was originally grown because he disliked spirit gum. Although he tried to stop the early Carry On films being shown on television – he was afraid the public might regard him as some sort of “comic idiot” – low comedy kept him in high style. In 1966 he was reputed to have earned £100,000 in four years.

Leslie Samuel Phillips was born into a poor family at Tottenham, north London, on April 20 1924 (he would be a lifelong supporter of Tottenham Hotspur). He was educated at Chingford School, where he took parts in plays. When he was 10 his father Frederick, who made cookers in Edmonton, died, and soon afterwards Leslie’s mother Cecelia enrolled him at the Italia Conti stage school.

He made his first appearance as a wolf in Peter Pan (Palladium, 1935) and appeared as a child in such West End productions as Dorothy L Sayers’ The Zeal of Thy House (Westminster, 1938), Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus (Queen’s), Margery Sharp’s The Nutmeg Tree (Lyric, 1941) and (usually uncredited) in pre-war films including Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers, King Vidor’s The Citadel, and The Mikado. Referring to the family’s money troubles, Phillips told The Guardian in 2009: “By the age of 14, I was earning more than the lot of them.”

He worked in repertory, acting and directing at York, Dundee, Watford, Buxton and Croydon, and had a small part in The Doctors’ Dilemma (Haymarket, 1942) before being called up during the Second World War, in which he served as a lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry before being invalided out with a nerve illness not long before the 1944 Normandy landings.

Phillips in Painting Churches with Josie Lawrence and Sian Phillips at the Playhouse Theatre, 1992 - Alastair Muir/Shutterstock
Phillips in Painting Churches with Josie Lawrence and Sian Phillips at the Playhouse Theatre, 1992 - Alastair Muir/Shutterstock

Returning to the West End in 1947 after another stint in rep, Phillips gained a name as a light comedian — first in Daddy Long Legs (Comedy), then in the backstage farce On Monday Next (Embassy, Swiss Cottage, and Comedy, 1949) and lastly as Lord Fancourt Babberley in Charley’s Aunt (Saville, 1950).

It was as Tony in Arthur Watkyn’s frolic For Better, For Worse (Comedy, 1952), which ran for 18 months, that he had his first starring role; and in The Diary of a Nobody (Arts, 1954) he remained in his comic element as the upstart son with the appalling girlfriend.

Then, in Philip Mackie’s thriller The Whole Truth (Aldwych, 1955) he became, somewhat surprisingly, a ruthless, though disarming, character, which led to three more murder plays.

One was another Mackie thriller, The Big Killing (Prince’s, now Shaftesbury, 1962) with Phillips as a rascally racing driver who bumped off women for bets; while The Deadly Game (Ashcroft, Croydon, 1963), by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, brought him one of his favourite parts in one of his favourite plays, as a light-hearted travelling salesman who dropped in on three old lawyers and hanged himself before the evening was out after a game of confessions.

Leslie Phillips in Doctor In Love with Michael Craig (left, standing) and Virginia Maskell, James Robertson Justice and Carole Lesley (seated, left to right)  - Rex Features
Leslie Phillips in Doctor In Love with Michael Craig (left, standing) and Virginia Maskell, James Robertson Justice and Carole Lesley (seated, left to right) - Rex Features

Phillips liked the play so much that he directed it four years later at the Savoy, having meanwhile spent several seasons as a blundering guest of an old school friend who was conducting affairs with three air hostesses in Boeing-Boeing (Apollo, 1963).

It was Joyce Rayburn’s The Man Most Likely To… (Vaudeville, 1968) that gave Phillips one of his longest runs. He directed and also played the father figure fancied by his son’s girlfriend staying overnight on the sofa. It kept him busy for six years. After 20 months in the West End, it toured South Africa and Australia. After another West End run at the Duke of York’s in 1973, it toured Australia again.

The sorting hat, with Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The sorting hat, with Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

In the wife-swapping comedy Roger’s Last Stand (Duke of York’s, 1975), Phillips played a husband who left home for the sake of peace and quiet, and took an empty flat only to be joined by another envious husband from similar circumstances – until both their wives turned up.

Among subsequent West End successes were The Lost Generation (Garrick), and Sextet (Criterion), which ran for two years, and a tour of Frederick Lonsdale’s Canaries Sometimes Sing.

Of his earlier films, well-remembered are the aristocrat married to one of Gene Kelly’s dancers in Les Girls (1957), the libidinous schools inspector in Carry On, Teacher (1959), the hospital patient in Carry On Nurse (1959), the incorrigible thief in Crooks Anonymous (1962) and the rampageous glutton in Seven Deadly Sins (1971). The obsessive tendencies in such cameos lost none of their intensity in screen versions of Whitehall farces, notably Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something (1973), Not Now, Comrade (1976) and Spanish Fly (1976).

In three of Ralph Thomas’s hugely popular adaptations of Richard Gordon’s comic novels Phillips played an accident-prone, nurse-chasing doctor, starting with Doctor in Love in 1960, followed by Doctor in Clover (1966) and the sub-standard last in the series Doctor in Trouble (1970).

Leslie Phillips at his wedding to his third wife Zara in 2013   - Christopher Pledger
Leslie Phillips at his wedding to his third wife Zara in 2013 - Christopher Pledger

Among Phillips’s later films were Out of Africa (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Scandal (1989), Mountains of the Moon (1990) and King Ralph (1991). In 2006, Roger Michell’s Venus won Phillips a BIFA (British Independent Film Award) for Best Supporting Actor playing Peter O’Toole’s friend, as well as the London Critics’ Circle Dilys Powell award; and he was the voice of the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011).

After his mother died in 1983, aged 92, shortly after being mugged at a bus stop by 13-year-olds, Phillips found that she had secretly kept scrapbooks full of photographs and newspaper cuttings about his career.

His 17-year marriage to Penelope Bartley, with whom he had two sons and two daughters, was dissolved in 1965, and she died in 1981. The following year he married the actress Angela Scoular; she died in 2011, and in 2013 he married, thirdly, Zara Carr, a Turkish social worker.

Leslie Phillips, born April 20 1924, died November 7 2022