Books: Review - Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography by Ron Moody

Published: 2 December, 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

More than just a hugely talented impersonator, Ron Moody planned to be a sociologist until ‘something happened’ on stage

HOW do you put the magic into a musical? How do you create a character that everyone remembers? How do you make people laugh out loud?

A touch of genius is one answer to all those questions. And if you are talking about Ron Moody, whose stage and film performance as “the merry old Jew” Fagin in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! lives on in so many memories, then you know that true talent brings electric rewards that circulate forever.

A pair of medieval shoes, some mittens, that awful flat-black cardinal’s hat, an umbrella transposed into a flute, and that big nose are all part of the serendipity, plus a voice that truly wanted to – and actually could – sing opera.

But if you want to go backstage and begin to understand how the build-up happens during tiring weeks of rehearsal when you hate the fact that you’ve been offered just £85 a week when you wanted £150, then you have to read Moody’s own true story.

It is an eye-opening saga of the difficult life of a star at odds with those who pull the strings – simplistic Lionel Bart, the creator of the show, Peter Coe, the demanding director, who has to be taught the essence of comedy, and eventually accepts that it can be sung like a hymn to humour.

And it takes an iconoclastic actor like Moody – and an equally eccentric stab at an autobiography – to make you understand, amid the tears and tiredness of it all, just what a brilliantly funny person he is.

Bloody clever, too, as he draws into a life-force performance the original words and phrases of Charles Dickens that escaped from the original, mundane script, and ad-libs fabulous new nuances that bring the house down.

How strange it is that the Jewish lad from Tottenham, now 86, who went to the LSE – on a post-war grant after serving with the RAF and aiming to become a sociologist – was diverted into acting by organising student concerts and revues.

Moody was, simply, a wonderful impersonator of people, from Groucho Marx and George Form­by to Jimmy Durante and Greta Garbo, declaring: “I vong to pee alone.” And to that he added his own written wit and wonder of the world.

A born clown, in fact. He reveals, as he dives into the diaries he kept from the age of 16, how he discovered that, once on stage, “something happened to me”, and adds, significantly: I think I was born.”

Born to entertain, to delight, to bring laughter to life, to the extent that he took 16 curtain calls on the opening night of Oliver!, now some 50 distant years ago yet still remembered in all halls of musical fame as a classic.

He knew the moment he auditioned for the part that he had to play it, even though his mother might object on the grounds that Fagin inspires anti-semitism.

That was why he swallowed the poor pay offered to him by the miserly producer, Donald Albery, and even accepted that Bart truly wanted Sid James or Max Bygraves instead. 

He put up too with the “intense and heavy” Georgia Brown playing a somewhat hysterical Nancy. “This witch resents my freedom and is fighting me by trying to kill my laughs,” Moody’s diary recalls. “What an atmosphere.”

It is this exacting detail, the honest way in which Moody reveals the backstage tensions, jealousies and rivalries as Oliver! is created in one mould, and slowly transformed by his own deviousness, that makes his story so remarkable and readable.

All this is in the second half of the book. The opening chapters are an experimental diversion into his past, his academic roots and fleeting memories, a search for truth that even drags in the philosopher Karl Popper. No doubt an indication that Moody still wants to push boundaries, but not such a good idea when it is reality that proves so much more intriguing.

Inevitably, Moody confesses his own sins, admits that all actors are paranoid, even tetchy, says sorry to those he feuded with before those inspired performances which lifted him above the squalid squabbles.

“The euphoria I felt on stage,” is his sublime personal achievement in a diverting story of a magnificent actor, who retains his innate Jewishness and wicked sense of humour. Alongside that is his engaging homespun philosophy. “You stay a student all your life,” Moody insists.

Yet you can always detect that twinkle in his eye you saw, as he danced with the Artful Dodger into the sunset at the end of Sir Carol Reed’s film sublime version of Oliver!

• Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography by Ron Moody. JR Books, £18.99