‘When you reach your seventies,’ mused a once successful actor, ‘you either don’t work anymore or you’re Leslie Phillips.’ Indeed Phillips’ career has been, and still is, something of a phenomenon, and not only his career in the theatre. His great secret from childhood onwards has been continual self- reinvention.
Starting life in extreme poverty in Tottenham, he was quite a success at school, especially in plays; he joined Miss Italia Conti’s celebrated acting academy, became a boy actor and then worked in a menial capacity for the top West End management H. M. Tennent’s.
The war intervened. In those class- ridden days having, as a Tennent actor, shed his ‘gorblimey’ accent, Phillips was regarded as officer material and became a lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry. Paralysis of a leg prevented him, to his chagrin, from seeing active service, but he made a more than competent officer.
Post-war he had no particular wish to resume his theatrical career, but poverty forced him to accept H.
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