Stanley Holloway

He made early stage appearances before infantry service in the First World War, after which he had his first major theatre success starring in Kissing Time when the musical transferred to the West End from Broadway.

In 1956 he was cast as the irresponsible and irrepressible Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady, a role that he played on Broadway, the West End and in the film version in 1964.

[5] When Augustus died, George Holloway (Stanley's father) moved to nearby Manor Park and became a clerk for a city lawyer, Robert Bell.

[10][n 3] During his early teenage years, Holloway attended the Worshipful School of Carpenters in nearby Stratford[12][13] and joined a local choir, which he later called his "big moment".

[14][15] He began performing part-time as Master Stanley Holloway – The Wonderful Boy Soprano from 1904, singing sentimental songs such as "The Lost Chord".

[18] However, a yearning to start a career in light entertainment and a contract to re-appear in Bert Graham and Will Bentley's concert party at the West Cliff Theatre caused him to return home after six months.

[32] Upon his return from France, Holloway was stationed in Hartlepool,[33] and immediately after the war ended he starred in The Disorderly Room with Leslie Henson, which Eric Blore had written while serving in the South Wales Borderers.

[29] After relinquishing his army commission in May 1919,[34] Holloway returned to London and resumed his singing and acting career, finding success in two West End musicals at the Winter Garden Theatre.

[36] Following its provincial success, The Disorderly Room was given a West End production at the Victoria Palace Theatre in late 1919, in which Holloway starred alongside Henson and Tom Walls.

[38] From June 1921, Holloway had considerable success in The Co-Optimists, a concert party formed with performers whom he had met during the war in France, which The Times called "an all-star 'pierrot' entertainment in the West-end.

The early BBC broadcasts brought variety and classical artists together, and Holloway could be heard in the same programme as the cellist John Barbirolli or the Band of the Scots Guards.

[46] After The Co-Optimists disbanded in 1927, Holloway played at the London Hippodrome in Vincent Youmans's musical comedy Hit the Deck as Bill Smith, a performance judged by The Times to be "invested with many shrewd touches of humanity".

He created Sam Small after Henson had returned from a tour of northern England and told him a story about an insubordinate old soldier from the Battle of Waterloo.

[50] The Times commented, "For absolute delight ... there is nothing to compare with Mr. Stanley Holloway's monologue, concerning a military contretemps on the eve of Waterloo ... perfect, even to the curled moustache and the Lancashire accent of the stubborn Guardsman hero.

"[51] In 1929 Holloway played another leading role in musical comedy, Lieutenant Richard Manners in Song of the Sea, and later that year he performed in the revue Coo-ee, with Billy Bennett, Dorothy Dickson and Claude Hulbert.

In his first season in the part, he was overshadowed by his co-star, Sir Henry Lytton, as the Emperor,[65] but he quickly became established as a favourite in his role, playing it in successive years in Leeds, London, Edinburgh and Manchester.

[78][79] He made his Australian début at The Tivoli Theatre, Melbourne,[80] and recorded television appearances to publicise the forthcoming release of Passport to Pimlico.

[82] In 1954 Holloway joined the Old Vic theatre company to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Robert Helpmann as Oberon and Moira Shearer as Titania.

Holloway reassured him over a lunch at Claridge's: Lerner recalled, "He put down his knife and fork, threw back his head and unleashed a strong baritone note that resounded through the dining room, drowned out the string quartet and sent a few dozen people off to the osteopath to have their necks untwisted.

[88] In The Manchester Guardian, Alistair Cooke wrote, "Stanley Holloway distils into the body of Doolittle the taste and smell of every pub in England.

[90] Looking back in 2004, Holloway's biographer Eric Midwinter wrote, "With his cockney authenticity, his splendid baritone voice, and his wealth of comedy experience, he made a great success of this role, and, as he said, it put him 'bang on top of the heap, in demand' again at a time when, in his mid-sixties, his career was beginning to wane".

Following his success on Broadway, Holloway played Pooh-Bah in a 1960 US television Bell Telephone Hour production of The Mikado, produced by the veteran Gilbert and Sullivan performer Martyn Green.

[92] His notable films around this time included Alive and Kicking in 1959, co-starring Sybil Thorndike and Kathleen Harrison,[93] and No Love for Johnnie in 1961 opposite Peter Finch.

[97] Holloway appeared for the first time in a major British television series in the BBC's 1967 adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories, playing Beach, the butler, to Ralph Richardson's Lord Emsworth.

[n 10] After My Fair Lady, Holloway was able to get film roles in Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter (1968), which featured the 1960s British pop group Herman's Hermits,[100] The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Flight of the Doves and Up the Front, all in the early 1970s.

[66] He made what he considered his West End debut as a straight actor in Siege by David Ambrose at the Cambridge Theatre in 1972,[n 11] co-starring with Alastair Sim and Michael Bryant.

[66] Holloway continued to perform until well into his eighties, touring Asia and Australia in 1977 together with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and David Langton in The Pleasure of His Company, by Samuel A. Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Not only is she my wife, lover, mother, cook, chauffeuse, private secretary, house keeper, hostess, electrician, business manager, critic, handy woman, she is also my best friend.

Holloway forged close friendships with fellow performers including Leslie Henson, Gracie Fields, Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier[124] and Arthur Askey, who said of him, "He was the nicest man I ever knew.

[130] A review in The Gramophone of one of his 1957 albums containing recordings of his old "concert party" songs commented, "what a fine voice he has and how well he can use it – diction, phrasing, range and the interpretative insight of the artist".