Terry-Thomas: The Comedy Icon

With his health failing, Terry-Thomas readily accepted an invitation to voice Sir Hiss in Disney's animated sojourn in Sherwood Forest. Playing the reptilian adviser to Prince John, T-T relished the sibilant dialogue, which was made all the more amusing by the fact that Hiss had gapped front teeth for his forked tongue to dart between. Indeed, his exchanges with Peter Ustinov, as the cowardly lion ruling England in the absence of his brother, King Richard, are the comic highlights of the film. Their banter in the carriage ride to Nottingham is particularly amusing, as Hiss boasts of hypnotising Richard into going on a crusade before attempting to use his spiralling eyes technique to cure PJ of his thumb-sucking habit. This bit of business was borrowed from another disreputable snake, Kaa in The Jungle Book (1967), who was voiced by the equally mellifluous George Sanders. But there's something irresistible about Terry-Thomas tutting incredulously at being described as 'a silly serpent'.

From Frank Launder's Two Thousand Women (1944) to the BBC sitcom, 'Allo 'Allo (1982-92), plucky civilians have been hiding British airmen from the Nazis. In Gérard Oury's comedy, the RAF bomber crew that parachutes into Paris is led by Sir Reginald (Terry-Thomas), who has no idea how to get to the rendezvous at a well-known Turkish bath. Seeking to keep the Brits out of the clutches of Major Achbach (Benno Sterzenbach) are painter Augustin Bouvet (Bourvil) and highly strung conductor Stanislas Lefort (Louis De Funès), whose double act helped sell the 17 million tickets that makes this the third most popular film in French screen history behind James Cameron's Titanic (1997) and Dany Boon's Welcome to the Sticks (2008). For once shorn of his trademark moustache, Terry-Thomas relishes the blend of verbal wit and slapstick schtick. It's essentially Carry On Vichy, but it looks like an art film thanks to cinematographer Claude Renoir and production designer Jean André.

Terry-Thomas earned the biggest payday of his career when United Artists forked out £100,000 for his services in Richard Quine's intricately structured battle of the sexes. The story might seem a little misanthropic today, but this dark farce is not to be taken at face value. After all, its protagonist is Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon), a comic-strip cartoonist who has butler Charles Firbank (Terry-Thomas) photograph him enacting the exploits of his secret agent hero, Bash Brannigan, in order to ensure their authenticity. But the idyllic bachelor existence that Charles describes in the opening guided tour of their chic New York abode is shattered when Ford drunkenly marries the Italian girl (Virna Lisi) who jumps out of a cake at a stag do. Hailing from the Jeeves school of English buttling, Charles suits T-T to a tee and his mounting pique, as Mrs Ford imposes her will on the household, perfectly demonstrates his mastery of comic characterisation and timing.

Adapted from Stephen Potter's satirical self-help books and subtitled 'How to Win Without Actually Cheating', Robert Hamer's comedy of social cruelty showcases Terry-Thomas's roguery at its most raffish. As Raymond Delauney, he goes out of his way to upstage fellow clubman Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael) and ruin his blossoming relationship with April Smith (Janette Scott). He turns on the charm when he runs into the couple at a swanky restaurant ('Oh, to be in England now April's here') and humiliates Palfrey on the tennis court with his effortless strokes, dubious line decisions and gratingly insincere calls of 'hard cheese' each time his opponent errs. The tables are eventually turned after Palfrey visits the College of Lifemanship run by Stephen Potter (Alastair Sim) in Yeovil. But the highlights centre on Delauney's insufferable sense of sneering superiority, which carried over into real life when Terry-Thomas opened fire with a ping-pong gun on some policemen about to give him a parking ticket.

The least regarded of the Boultings' institutional satires, this is a witty dissection of Britain's postwar decline, the struggle for colonial independence and the limited power of the United Nations to affect the Cold War. Notwithstanding its anticipation of the Cuban crisis, the storyline has much in common with Jack Arnold's The Mouse That Roared, which appeared in cinemas a couple of months later. But the focus falls firmly on Terry-Thomas as Cadogan De Vere Carlton-Browne, who, as head of the Department of Miscellaneous Territories, is sent to the forgotten island of Gaillardia to keep valuable deposits of cobalt out of Soviet hands and prevent a scheming grand duke from usurping his Oxford-educated nephew. Playing a man described as 'rubble from the nostrils up', T-T switches effortlessly from bounder to bungler, as he is outwitted by Machiavellian prime minister Peter Sellers and flukily manages to prevent an international incident. Given Britain's current travails, this diplomatic farce seems disconcertingly topical.

Reuniting with Mario Zampi, Terry-Thomas plays the ultimate rotter in this spirited study of (dis)honour among thieves. Embroiled in a battle with the Inland Revenue, Billy Gordon doesn't trust banks and keeps his cash in secret stashes. However, when he refuses to pay a £25,000 ransom for the return of his kidnapped wife, she wreaks her revenge with the help of the gang who had abducted her. Brenda De Banzie splendidly demonstrates that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, while George Cole is on bumbling form as the clueless criminal mastermind whose incompetence exasperates cohorts Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw. But this is one of Terry-Thomas's best showcases, as he flirts shamelessly with a female journalist, refuses to part with £200 to recover De Banzie, bluffs his way through an awkward encounter with James and Bresslaw posing as cops, and endures a nightmare day in court with incredulous magistrate John Le Mesurier.

The first of Terry-Thomas's four collaborations with Peter Sellers proved an uncomfortable experience, as he suffered from lumbago throughout the shoot and wound up in court on an unproven charge of being drunk and disorderly after mixing painkillers and champagne at a Christmas party. Ever the professional, however, Terry-Thomas soldiered on, ironically becoming the worse for wear at one point when his drink is spiked and he is bundled out of a hamper into a freezing cold pond. He also falls into the Thames in the course of Mario Zampi's mischievous comedy, as his rascally aristocrat is blackmailed by scandal sheet publisher, Dennis Price. Sellers, Peggy Mount and Shirley Eaton also risk having their pasts exposed before they join murderous forces. But T-T's best scenes take place on the staircase of his spacious townhouse, as wife Georgina Cookson catches him sneaking in after another misadventure and casts aspersions over his dubious excuses for looking so dishevelled.

Novelist Kingsley Amis was convinced that Terry-Thomas had been miscast as pretentious writer Bertrand Welch in this adaptation of his bestselling satire on university life. He might have had a point, as T-T was actually a year older than Hugh Griffith, who was playing his history professor father. But John and Roy Boulting (who had inherited the project from Charles Crichton) had come to trust Terry-Thomas's instincts. Thus, from the moment he enters singing the madrigal that is taxing campus novice Ian Carmichael, he plays the part of an academic snob seeking to exploit his father's contacts with a hissable air of sneering arrogance. Whether bungling the floral decorations for a grand ball, buttering up the chancellor he hopes will publish his book or fighting with Carmichael over girlfriend Sharon Acker, Terry-Thomas knowingly captures the sense of unearned entitlement that 'angry young men' like Amis were railing against.

During the war, Roy and John Boulting had served with the Army Film and Photographic Unit and were well versed in the workings of the propaganda machine. Thus, they consciously adapted Alan Hackney's novel as an antidote to the tales of derring-do that were being churned out to offset Britain's postwar decline. This winking study in skullduggery presented Terry-Thomas with one of his best-known catchphrases, as he bumps into the raw recruits under his command at Gravestone Barracks at the cinema and dubs them 'an absolute shower'. Major Hitchcock is hardly a paragon, however, as he is in cahoots with Brigadier Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) and Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough) in Operation Hatrack, which involves hapless hero Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) in a plot to steal some priceless artworks. The principals would reunite in the labour relations satire, I'm All Right, Jack (1959), with Hitchcock as the dyspeptic personnel officer at Tracepurcel's dodgy engineering company.

Terry-Thomas's TV sketch show set the tone for this Monty Berman and Robert S. Barker romp, in which he adopts a number of disguises as a private eye investigating a string of burglaries linked to Gwynneth Vaughan's nightclub. Posing as an Italian waiter, T-T manages to upset several customers before he passes himself off as a German psychoanalyst in order to quiz suspect Michael Balfour's ditzy girlfriend, Lilian Grey. Unsurprisingly, the gap in his teeth gives him away and he has no more luck impersonating a haughty army officer and a bobby on the beat. It's interesting to compare this exercise in Wodehousian silly-assery with another multi-role assignment, as Terry-Thomas relied on 'the help of wigs, moustaches and lashings of Max Factor' to play a snooty hotel manager, a lecherous general and a despairing duke alongside Virna Lisi in Mauro Bolognini's damsel in distress farce, Arabella (1967), which marked the last screen appearance of the ever-marvellous Margaret Rutherford.