A jazz pianist who ended up in comedy, and a small man who was funniest standing next to a tall one. Dudley Moore's timing was real and his charm was real; Hollywood asked him to play the same lovable drunk until the charm ran out.
Fi1m perspective
In Arthur (1981) Dudley Moore falls off a bar stool with more grace than most actors manage walking across a room, and that fall is the whole act in a second: a small man, a quick body, a face that asks to be liked and usually gets its way. He was trained for something else entirely. A scholarship to the Guildhall as a boy, an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, then jazz piano with John Dankworth and his own trio. The timing he brought to comedy was a musician's: he knew where the beat fell and how late he could land on it.
The first career was British and sharp. Beyond the Fringe (1960–1964) put him beside Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett and set off the satire boom; Not Only... But Also (1965–1970) gave the BBC Pete and Dud; Bedazzled (1967) had him acting, co-writing and composing, with Cook towering over him and refusing to react. That was the arrangement that suited him best: the small man babbling, the tall man unmoved. When the partnership wound down around 1978 he went to Los Angeles, and Foul Play (1978), 10 (1979) and Arthur (1981) made him, for a few years, a leading man.
Arthur is where we have looked closest, and we rate it a little lower than most critics do. Moore is quick and likeable in it, and his dinner at the Plaza with Anne De Salvo's Gloria, treating a prostitute with perfect manners she cannot place, is as good as he ever was. But the giggle defeated us: by the fourth or fifth time he laughed at his own joke before we could, we stopped laughing and started waiting for him to finish. A drunk act is a short act, and Steve Gordon's script asks it to carry whole scenes. What saves the film is that Hollywood found him another tall, unmoved man in John Gielgud, and the old arrangement worked again. Moore works hard, Gielgud does nothing, and the nothing is funnier every time.
In 1983 he said that in all his films he basically played himself, and he meant it as a strength. It was also the problem. After Micki & Maude (1984), the second of his two films with Blake Edwards, the scripts got worse and the part stayed the same, the lovable loser with a drink in his hand, and the edge of the Cook years was nowhere in it. He went back to the piano, which had never let him down.
Watch Bedazzled for the partnership and the first half-hour of Arthur for the man at his loosest. For the rest of him, put on a record.
Biography
Dudley Stuart John Moore was an English actor, comedian, musician and composer. He first came to prominence in the UK as a leading figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s. He was one of the four writer-performers in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960. With Peter Cook, Moore collaborated on the BBC television series Not Only... But Also.
Moore's film career included Bedazzled (1967), Foul Play (1978), 10 (1979) and Arthur (1981), in which he played Arthur Bach. For Arthur, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won a Golden Globe Award. He received a second Golden Globe for Micki & Maude (1984).
Moore was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1987 and was made a CBE in 2001. He was born on 19 April 1935 in Dagenham, Essex, and died on 27 March 2002.
