Bob Hope, who has died aged 100, was so much part of the bloodstream of American showbusiness for so long that if there was a Mount Rushmore for comedians he would be among the first to be sculptured, with his celebrated retroussé nose forming a ski jump.
Nor would it be inappropriate since Hope, whom Time once called "an American folk figure", was on intimate terms with every American president since Harry Truman, at all of whom he directed inoffensive gibes.
For many people under 50, Bob Hope's immense status might seem perplexing given the inferior quality of many of his films and his reputation as a comic reliant on an army of gag-writers. The answer lies in the nostalgia inherent in Hope's signature tune, Thanks For The Memory.
During the war years his snappy, escapist films brought joy to audiences on the home front, while he was the only Hope (puns on his surname always de rigueur) for thousands of troops overseas whom he entertained on his various tours from 1941. Those growing up in the gloomy postwar period remember his films with glee, especially the three My Favourite . . . (Blonde . . . Brunette . . . Spy) movies, and his seven Road pictures, with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour.
Leslie Townes Hope was born in Eltham, south-east London, the fifth of seven sons of an unsuccessful master stonemason, who took his family to the US when Bob was five. He was brought up in a tough neighbourhood of Cleveland, where he learned to defend himself both physically and verbally.
Hope, who claimed to have inherited his sense of humour from his paternal grandfather from Hertfordshire, started performing at an early age, singing and tap-dancing, and winning a Charlie Chaplin imitation competition. Of his lack of much formal education, Hope once commented: "I didn't get to college until I played a Harvard man in Son of Paleface."
He began his professional career in 1920 in a show headed by "Fatty" Arbuckle in Cleveland, before teaming up with another performer for a blackface act which toured in vaudeville. Later he is asked in the haunted-house comedy-thriller The Cat And The Canary (1939) if big, empty houses scare him, Hope replies: "Not me. I was in vaudeville".
After going solo, Hope landed the role of Huckleberry Haines in Jerome Kern's Roberta, the part played by Fred Astaire in the film version. In 1932, during the run of the musical on Broadway, he met and married Dolores Read, a nightclub singer, with whom he remained all his life; they adopted four children.
Other stage successes followed: Cole Porter's Red, Hot And Blue, with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman, and the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, in which he sang I Can't Get Started With You to chorus girl Eve Arden. In these shows he was able to hone his topical ad-lib technique, while proving himself no mean singer (he had a lilting tenor voice) and hoofer.
But it was on the Pepsodent radio shows, which started in 1938, that the "Bob Hope character" was born - a craven, conceited (he would purr at himself in the mirror), credulous buffoon, prepared to double-cross anybody, man or woman, to save his own skin.
Although Hope had made a number of two-reelers for Warner Bros, he made his feature film debut in The Big Broadcast Of 1938 for Paramount, the studio where he remained for 15 years. As an MC on board a luxury liner, he got to sing the wistful Leo Robin-Ralph Rainger Oscar-winning song, Thanks For The Memory, with Shirley Ross. In order to cash in on the hit song, Paramount immediately teamed Hope with Ross again in the film Thanks For The Memory, in which they sang another superb duet, Two Sleepy People, written by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser.
But it was in The Cat And The Canary that Hope was first able to give the impression of ad-libbing in front of the camera, and in which he had to cope with a heroine (Paulette Goddard) who is smarter and stronger than himself, a role-reversal situation that continued throughout most of his films.
In 1940 Paramount cast Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour for a one-off musical comedy called Road To Singapore. It was such a smash that it led to six further Road pictures (if one counts the dismal made-in-England Road To Hong Kong in 1962). The trio would take the Road To Zanzibar (1941), Morocco (1942), Utopia (1946), Rio (1948) and Bali (1953), although they hardly ever strayed from the studio backlot.
The appeal of the films lay in the surreal in-jokes, the freewheeling screenplays and the friend-foe banter between Hope and Crosby, vying for the affections of Lamour as they struggled to extricate themselves from perilous circumstances in exotic locations. Inevitably, Crosby got the girl, except in Road To Utopia, though Lamour's and Hope's son turns out to look exactly like Bing.
He continued in the same wisecracking vein opposite Jane Russell in two spoof Westerns, The Paleface (1948), in which he was a correspondence-school dentist, and Son Of Paleface (1952) where, having caused derision among cowboys in a saloon by ordering milk, Hope quickly adds "in a dirty glass". In another picture, when told in court that "anything you say might be held against you," Hope replies, "Jane Russell".
Gradually, Hope took on more rounded serio-comic roles, such as the two Damon Runyon characters, Sorrowful Jones (1949) and The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and in the biopics The Seven Little Foys (1954), based on the life of vaudevillian Eddie Foy, and Beau James (1957) about Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant mayor of New York in the 1920s. The Facts Of Life (1960), which dealt with Hope and Lucille Ball carrying on an unconsummated adulterous affair, began a string of feeble sex comedies, futile attempts to participate in the "permissive society". He was more comfortable in the blander regions of television, and making innumerable personal appearances at presidential functions.
Hope hosted the Oscar ceremonies 22 times. Although he himself was presented with six honorary Academy Awards, he never got one for a performance. "Welcome to the Academy Awards," he said at one gala, "or, as it is known in my house, Passover." Marlon Brando once described him as "an applause junkie". Hope himself conceded: "When I die they'd better nail the lid of the box down pretty quick, or I'll be up right away for an encore."
Applause apart, Hope gave generously to many organisations, including £60,000 to a theatre in Eltham now named the Bob Hope Theatre, and he was frequently seen on the golf course at the various Bob Hope Charity Pro-Am tournaments in the US and in England. His wealth started to grow when he became an independent producer on My Favourite Brunette in 1947. The Hope empire extended into oil fields, baseball teams, TV stations and thousands of acres of land in the San Fernando valley and Palm Springs.
Hope continued to be the most active and widely travelled entertainer of US troops abroad, having played to thousands of soldiers in Europe and the Pacific during the second World War, and in Korea, where he toured military hospitals. But when he visited Vietnam he found himself out of touch with the pot-smoking troops, many of them black, who heckled him and held up placards reading "Peace Not Hope". For once his chirpy personality was rattled.
Bob (Leslie Townes) Hope: born May 29th, 1903; died July 27th, 2003