DreamWeaver
03-27-2002, 11:23 AM
Wednesday March 27, 2002 7:00 PM
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Actor Dudley Moore, who became an unlikely Hollywood heart-throb portraying a cuddly pipsqueak whose charm melted hearts in ``10'' and ``Arthur,'' died Wednesday at his home in New Jersey, a spokeswoman said. He was 66.
Moore died at 11 a.m. EST, said publicist Michelle Bega in Los Angeles. The British-born actor died of pneumonia as a complication of progressive supranuclear palsy, she said.
There was more than a touch of autobiography in ``10,'' the 1979 film in which Moore played a musician determined to marry a perfect woman. But the happy ending eluded him in real life. Four marriages ended in divorce.
He confessed to being driven by feelings of inferiority about his working-class origins in Dagenham, east London, and because of his height of five feet, 2 1/2 inches. In later life he also spoke of the pain of being rejected by his mother because he was born with a deformed left foot.
Comedians, he said in an interview with Newsday in 1980, are often driven by such feelings. ``I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. ... I guess if I'd been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn't have been a comic.''
Moore also radiated a sense of emotional neediness, which was probably rooted in his childhood. His mother, Ada, once told him that she had wanted to kill him at birth because of his club foot.
``She said I would suffer unbearably, but obviously it was the pain she was going to suffer, feeling as she did that she was on trial for producing a hunchback,'' Moore told his biographer, Barbara Paskin.
Music was Moore's entree into public performance, first as a chorister and organist in his parish church in Dagenham, near London, and then in 1960 as a young Oxford graduate recruited for the hit four-man comedy review ``Beyond the Fringe.''
``Fringe,'' which played two years in London and then moved to Broadway, was perhaps the greatest assembly of young comic talent in Britain in this century. Moore was teamed with Alan Bennett, later a successful playwright; Jonathan Miller, the cerebral opera producer and medical doctor, and Peter Cook, a surreal comic talent and a famously dissipated talent.
Moore's whimsical sense of humor fitted oddly with the more savage satirical style of his partners. ``Apart from his musical contributions to the show,'' Cook wrote in Esquire in 1974, ``Dudley's suggestions were treated with benign contempt by the rest of us.''
You will be missed
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LOS ANGELES (AP) - Actor Dudley Moore, who became an unlikely Hollywood heart-throb portraying a cuddly pipsqueak whose charm melted hearts in ``10'' and ``Arthur,'' died Wednesday at his home in New Jersey, a spokeswoman said. He was 66.
Moore died at 11 a.m. EST, said publicist Michelle Bega in Los Angeles. The British-born actor died of pneumonia as a complication of progressive supranuclear palsy, she said.
There was more than a touch of autobiography in ``10,'' the 1979 film in which Moore played a musician determined to marry a perfect woman. But the happy ending eluded him in real life. Four marriages ended in divorce.
He confessed to being driven by feelings of inferiority about his working-class origins in Dagenham, east London, and because of his height of five feet, 2 1/2 inches. In later life he also spoke of the pain of being rejected by his mother because he was born with a deformed left foot.
Comedians, he said in an interview with Newsday in 1980, are often driven by such feelings. ``I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. ... I guess if I'd been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn't have been a comic.''
Moore also radiated a sense of emotional neediness, which was probably rooted in his childhood. His mother, Ada, once told him that she had wanted to kill him at birth because of his club foot.
``She said I would suffer unbearably, but obviously it was the pain she was going to suffer, feeling as she did that she was on trial for producing a hunchback,'' Moore told his biographer, Barbara Paskin.
Music was Moore's entree into public performance, first as a chorister and organist in his parish church in Dagenham, near London, and then in 1960 as a young Oxford graduate recruited for the hit four-man comedy review ``Beyond the Fringe.''
``Fringe,'' which played two years in London and then moved to Broadway, was perhaps the greatest assembly of young comic talent in Britain in this century. Moore was teamed with Alan Bennett, later a successful playwright; Jonathan Miller, the cerebral opera producer and medical doctor, and Peter Cook, a surreal comic talent and a famously dissipated talent.
Moore's whimsical sense of humor fitted oddly with the more savage satirical style of his partners. ``Apart from his musical contributions to the show,'' Cook wrote in Esquire in 1974, ``Dudley's suggestions were treated with benign contempt by the rest of us.''
You will be missed
http://members.aol.com/msgina754/images/rfpic1pantera.jpg