Born Brilliant

We trolled along on a sunny Sunday afternoon last weekend to the wonderful "Gay's The Word" bookshop in arty Bloomsbury for a special reading - the launch of Christopher Stevens' definitive masterwork on the life of Kenneth Williams, Born Brilliant.

A wonderful, knowledgeable and witty reader, Mr Stevens gave us practically chapter-and-verse the story of Kenny's childhood, his acting and dressing-up games and his burgeoning desire to better himself - and that was just for starters! For the next couple of hours, he presented anecdote after anecdote, observation after theory, about this wonderful man (including his conclusion that Kenny's death was not suicide, but an unfortunate reaction between barbiturates and Zantac).

As one of his surviving family friends (who Mr Stevens managed to get to speak publicly for the first time) put it, Kenneth Williams was essentially "afraid of maturity". The well-documented private person behind the hysterically camp public image was in effect a forever stunted pseudo-adolescent, wilfully avoiding grown-up matters such as sex, relationships and responsibility, preferring obsessive cleanliness, solitude and the ultimate expression of "selfishness" - his diary.

Kenny was apparently embarrassed by the fact that he embarked upon his acting career with no formal drama school training behind him. He felt somehow unworthy of the parts he got, yet deserving of better - this was just one of the many contradictions in his life. Despite being wildly popular with the critics and the public alike, a few of the West End productions in which he starred were not a commercial success. This bothered him immensely. He disliked being the pivot upon which any production hinged. He much preferred being a player, part of a company where some other "deserving" star - be it Ingrid Bergman or Maggie Smith, or even Hancock - was the one upon whose head the responsibility for its success or failure rested.

Loathing - whether of self, or (much to many people's surprise and upset once the fuller version of his diaries was published after his death) of fellow actors, colleagues and friends - seems to be the watchword for Kenny's life. He resented his father's bombastic manner, and the mental and physical decline that led the Williams family out of slum poverty into middle-class Bloomsbury and back again into bankruptcy. He loathed the direction that his career had taken him (in particular the eternally popular Carry On films). He loathed the arrogance of Hancock, the sordid commonness of Sid James, the sleaze of Joe Orton, and the downright rudeness of Orson Welles (who, remarkably, offered him the opportunity to launch a career in America, which Kenny turned down). He could be cruel and waspish at the drop of a hat, and cared little who he upset in the process.

However, as Mr Stevens has also found, the mercurial nature of Kenneth Williams meant his life was not all doom-and-gloom. When he did cultivate friendships, they lasted more or less for the rest of his life. He proposed to several female friends, including Sheila Hancock and Joan Sims. He was loved for, and thoroughly enjoyed, being a "national treasure" - queen of the chat shows. He certainly revelled in the sexlessness of his Music Hall style of camp - innuendo without the "messy bits".

And we adored him for it! That is I assume why Mr Stevens embarked on this project. To conduct such careful research into the life of a man about whom millions of words have already been written (many by his own hand, indeed), reading every single one of the great man's diaries (incidentally written longhand in at least twelve different styles of handwriting, depending on Kenneth's mood!), to interview childhood friends previously unknown, to produce a comprehensive biography of this magnitude - it is a labour of love. I have just opened this impressive tome, and look forward to reading it from cover to cover...

Here's the ebullient Mr Williams, the ultimate chat show guest:

Kenneth Williams - Parkinson, 1980

...and here, his classic "Franglais" piss-take:

Kenneth Williams - Ma Crepe Suzette

Buy your copy of Born Brilliant from Foyles

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Gay's the Word bookshop