DUDLEY MOORE: After Dudley Moore, who died on March 27th aged 66, metamorphosed into a Hollywood star in 1979 with his film 10, he told a reporter: "Isn't it incredible? It's something I've always wanted, but I never thought I stood a chance."
It was certainly a long way from his unpromising beginnings as the son of a railway electrician brought up on a Dagenham housing estate. When Dudley Moore was born on April 19th, 1935, in Charing Cross Hospital, his feet were turned inwards. At the age of two weeks, he had the first of many operations, but his left leg remained almost two inches shorter than his right, and he was conscious from an early age of the guilt that his mother Ada, who was a Christian Scientist, felt about his defect. But she got him to take piano lessons; by the age of eight, he had learnt to play the organ, and was also singing in the church choir.
At 11, he was awarded a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, where, for the next eight years, he studied the harpsichord, organ, violin, musical theory and composition every Saturday morning. During the week, at Dagenham County High School, he was bullied and teased with cruel names like "Hopalong Cassidy". So he turned to clowning to protect himself - the classic comedian, born of adversity.
In 1954, he won a music scholarship to Oxford, where he made a name for himself as a jazz musician and entertainer in revues, wrote music for plays and appeared in Oxford University Drama School productions.
After graduating from Magdalen College in 1958, Dudley Moore toured Britain and the United States with the Vic Lewis Jazz Band. He then joined the John Dankworth band; formed the Dudley Moore Trio; did a cabaret act with Joe Melia; and wrote the music for two plays at the Royal Court, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and N.F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum. Soon the call came from the 1960 Edinburgh Festival to appear with three other Oxbridge graduates, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook, in Beyond The Fringe, the official festival revue at the Royal Lyceum Theatre.
When the revue transferred to London's Fortune Theatre in May 1961, Kenneth Tynan called it the moment when "English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th century".
The show transferred to Broadway; after it completed its run, Dudley Moore continued with his trio, and wrote music for the theatre. He was reunited with Cook for a BBC2 comedy series, Not Only . . . But Also, which began in 1965; a second series followed in 1966 and a third in 1970. The show's highlights were the Dud 'n' Pete sketches, in which they played proletarian philosophers in cloth caps, dirty raincoats and white scarves swapping undigested pieces of information.
Their television fame lead them to make five feature films together, the best being Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967), an episodic Faustian tale, with Dudley Moore as a lovable little man filled with self-doubt about his height, sex life and personality.
Dudley Moore was almost 32 when he took on his first solo starring role in 30 Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia, which, without support from Cook's lofty presence or invention, gave him a chance to demonstrate his ability as a musical pasticheur, and to indulge in romantic wish-fulfilment with his co-star, Suzy Kendall, whom he married in 1968.
His marriage ended in divorce and he linked up with Cook again for a two-handed review, Behind The Fringe, which opened at the Cambridge Theatre in 1972. This had the classic sketch, One Leg Too Few, about a one-legged actor (a part that was brazenly tackled by Dudley Moore) auditioning to play the part of Tarzan.
While this show was running in New York, Dudley Moore met Hollywood "Teen Queen" Tuesday Weld, who was then 20 years old. They married in 1975 and had a son. His partnership with Cook ended after the abysmal film The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1977) and he separated from Weld in 1978 (they divorced in 1980), he settled in Los Angeles.
In his first Hollywood film, Foul Play (1978), he played a would-be swinger picked up by Goldie Hawn in a singles bar.
At a group therapy session, he met Blake Edwards, who cast him in his film 10, after George Segal walked out of the picture. It is hard to believe that the role of the successful composer-pianist who falls for the voluptuous Bo Derek (the 10-out-of-10 desirable woman of the title) had not been written with Dudley Moore in mind. He managed to play melancholy middle-aged delusion, as a sexually fixated lover stoned on amphetamines and double brandies, while negotiating the slapstick with which Edwards likes to punctuate films. It made Dudley Moore a star, gained him a female following and the nicknames "Cuddly Dudley" and "The Sex Thimble".
He soon found himself in an even bigger hit, Arthur (1980), a tale founded on the notion that a poor rich man who is continually inebriated and infantile could win the concern and affection of audiences. It was to Dudley Moore's credit that against all odds he gave the potentially irritating character some believability. The $100 million box-office success earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
From 1980 to 1985, he made nine films, none of them much above mediocre. Even Arthur Two: On the Rocks (1988) failed to draw crowds. But Dudley Moore was a wonderfully natural clown with a comic persona, his dark good looks and warm personality overcoming many weaknesses in scripts and direction. He was in demand as a personality on television talk shows, did commercials for Tesco chickens, and brought irreverence and naughty humour to gooey award ceremonies.
His five-year liaison with Susan Anton, model and actress ended and he married another former model and actress, Brogan Lane, in 1987.
That year, he played the Lord High Executioner in Jonathan Miller's non-Japanese Mikado at the Los Angeles Music Center. This was further proof that if his film career dried up he was still versatile enough to make a good living on the stage, or the concert platform, and as a jazz musician.
In 1994, Dudley Moore married Nicole Rothschild (they had a son); a few months after the marriage, she called the Los Angeles Police Department to arrest Dudley Moore for assaulting her. At their divorce, Nicole sued Dudley Moore for $3 million because of what she called his "campaign of terror and abuse".
His professional woes began when Barbra Streisand sacked him from her film The Mirror Has Two Faces because he constantly forgot his lines and insisted on hamming things up; his television sitcom, Daddy's Girls, was cancelled after a few episodes.
His last public appearance was to receive a CBE for services to entertainment at Buckingham Palace last November.
He is survived by his two sons.
• Dudley Moore: born 1935; died, March 2002