Venus brought Leslie Phillips back to Pinewood 70 years after his debut. Despite decades playing it straight, he is still best known as the rogue of Carry On movies, he tells Stephen Dixon.
'Hello," he says. It comes out as a languid, lecherous hair-leau, stretched almost to snapping-point, uttered in this remarkable way because Leslie Phillips knows people might feel cheated if they didn't hear it, even though the days when he cooed the word into the ears of blushing starlets are long gone.
After he's greeted the audience at a showing of Venus during the Dublin International Film Festival, Phillips suavely chats away about various lovely women with whom he's worked. Helen Mirren - "smashing. A smashing lady". Jordan - "a jolly nice girl". Host Michael Dwyer mentions the film This Other Eden, which he made here 48 years ago, and his co-star, Audrey Dalton. "Oh, ye-e-e-s-s-s," purrs Phillips. "Fantastic lady, fantastic." He chortles knowingly.
He's in excellent shape for a man of almost 83, and the festival audience's glee at being in his presence is palpable. As a performer, Leslie Phillips has always been disarmingly likeable. The character he played in all those Doctor and Carry On films in the 1950s and 1960s, the predatory smoothie with the little blond moustache who chatted-up mini-skirted cuties with a murmured "Oh, I say" or an admiring "Ding dong" is still embedded in the public's consciousness, in spite of the fine serious stage and film work he has done in the 30 years since he gave up playing that sort of part.
And it was very much a part. Although he has the air of being an upper-crust wastrel who drifted into this acting lark to have a cushy time and meet pretty girls, he's really a working-class Cockney who came from a background of poverty and struggle, and he has been a performer for an astonishing 70 years.
A steely element in his personality has helped him survive in the British entertainment world for so long, and so successfully, and I get a glimpse of this the morning after the screening when I meet him for coffee at his Dublin hotel and ask him about all those catchphrases.
"Those words will be on my bloody tombstone," he says. "Well, people expect them from me. But I never pushed it. It came to me, not the other way round. People were always coming up to me and saying 'say hello' or 'say ding dong'. I was at a British Comedy Awards ceremony, and Jonathan Ross was amazed that an audience of 1,000 people in Grosvenor House would fall apart just because a man walked on stage and said 'hello'.
"I was on one TV show and I said I could probably do it with any word. It's something to do with what's going on behind. And I did it with 'Good morning' and 'How are you?' and the audience response was the same. It's to do with timing and expectancy. It's all to do with contact. You can contact a thousand people like that." He snaps his fingers and smiles.
In Venus, Phillips gives an intensely touching performance as Ian, an ancient actor whose young great-niece, played by Jodie Whittaker, is foisted on him by his family. Ian's closest friend, Maurice, another decrepit actor (Peter O'Toole), becomes besotted with the girl, who - as Phillips puts it - "milks the old fool for all she can, while Ian looks on in disgust as the relationship develops and disintegrates". There's one magnificent scene in which Ian and Maurice tipsily waltz together in a church while a string quartet plays Dvorak, and Phillips looks into the ravaged beauty of O'Toole's face and oh-so-tenderly kisses his friend's thinning grey fronds.
"When we were shooting that scene we extemporised and - blimey! - I kissed him on the head, didn't I? It was all completely spontaneous. We didn't rehearse. We just went at it. Same with the scene in the cafe, where Peter and I have a fight. And then we had this extraordinary thing of the crew applauding us after the scene, which I've never seen before in all the films I've been in, and neither had the director, Roger Michell.
"And that's a lot to do with Peter because he's so powerful, and to be fought by a less powerful person, there was a kind of competition going on there. And the crew loved it. But really it all goes back to the script. When I read Hanif's Kureishi's screenplay, I thought 'Blimey. I don't get scripts like this.' I've done some crap in my life. Peter is such an able man, though he's had such a wild life. I adore working with him. He can be a tricky old so-and-so sometimes, but he just wants to get things right and he doesn't like to be pissed around."
When Phillips was 10 his father, a gas worker, died, and the family was thrown into poverty. His older brother and sister worked to keep things going and his mother took in sewing, but young Leslie was sent to the Italia Conti stage school, where his fees were deferred until he was earning.
'When I started work I was just a child and I did everything in the theatre and people were terribly good to me. I'm talking about the theatre staff. They taught me things. How to cleat a line. How to move scenery. And then I worked in the box office, and then I was a callboy. I did every job in the theatre, and that's how I learned the business. Back and front. And it was all kind of fun, but also in a way quite lonely, because although my mother was a darling, once she'd pushed me she stepped back. She didn't become a theatrical mum. So I was on my own."
He served in the army during the second World War, and in 1944 went back into the theatre, touring as an assistant stage manager and sometime actor in "the murkiest, rat-infested old theatres and music halls in the north of England". He developed his outstanding gift for light comedy and, after success in the West End, became a film actor in the early 1950s.
He appeared in three of the early Carry On films and then left the series because "the money was so appalling. They were enormously successful, but the producers were so mean."
Shooting Venus at Pinewood brought back memories of the days when he made his movie debut as a child extra there 70 years ago, and the camaraderie of the Carry Ons 20 years later - Kenneth Williams going out into the street and directing the traffic in his Carry On Constable uniform, and the rest of the team marvelling at the size of Charles Hawtrey's todger when they had to undress for a shower scene (oh, I say!).
The personal life of the man whose professional stock-in-trade was seduction shows scant signs of serial womanising. His marriage to Penelope Bartley in 1948 produced four children, and Phillips was a faithful husband until he fell in love with Caroline Mortimer, stepdaughter of Sir John Mortimer. He and Mortimer were together for many years but broke up because she wanted children and Phillips felt he shouldn't become a father again. He has been happily married to actor Angela Scoular since 1982.
Since he stopped playing the romantic rogue he has financed and directed productions, acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and for Steven Spielberg, and made many notable television appearances in straight roles. He also wrote a memoir last year for Orion, called, inevitably, Hello, full of great stories.
A passage gives an insight into the real Leslie Phillips: "I found I enjoyed the business of film-making, but I took it just as seriously as stage acting and tried to apply the same disciplines . . . I made an effort to concentrate on the role, to prepare myself and my character thoroughly before I went on set - just as I do today. As a result, I've always been a little irritated by those actors who are still joking, drinking and arseing about before they go on. It's amazing how many people do this while on the job. It seems to me that we are usually being paid a lot of money for being there, and the least we can do is turn in the most professional, best-honed performance we can."
But for most people he's still that silly fellow with the little moustache and an eye for the ladies. Was old Ding Dong based on anyone he knew? "No. I've never met anyone like that. Have you? I invented him. I suppose I was thought of as being a bit of a devil in various ways. But I meant no harm, you know. It was not nasty, and I was never threatening. I just seemed like a man who was out for a bit of fun. And people liked that."
Leslie Phillips still has pulling power. "It happens if I go to the Baftas, or something like that. When I went to [the presentation of] an award for Ronnie Barker, who was one of my greatest friends, I was with my wife, and when we went in there was a group of people, and all the girls rushed over to me, and my wife said "What do they all want?" I said I didn't know. But they just wanted to come over and give me a kiss and a cuddle."
Venus is on general release
