This is the story of a comedian whose star was in the ascendancy in the 1940s. Like many of his contemporaries he had been offered radio spots after working at the famous Windmill Theatre. In the post-war years he was everywhere: on radio, television, variety theatre, stage plays and the cinema. He was known as ‘the English Bob Hope’. But from the 1950s his personal life started to unravel with divorces, bankruptcy, a very public affair with a well-known actress, two suicide attempts, numerous court appearances and a stretch in prison. This is the story of Michael Howard.
First of all
Michael Howard wasn't actually Michael Howard, he was Ian McKenzie, he would
adopt his stage name by deed poll in 1941. He was born in 1916 in Holywell
Green, just south of Halifax, as at the time his father was serving as the
congregational pastor at the village church. John McKenzie had been born in
Aberdeen in 1882 and studied divinity at the city’s university. In 1912 he
married Margaret Murray and moved to Holywell Green. The family moved to
Wolverhampton in 1917 and again to Nottingham in 1921 when he was appointed as
the first Jesse Boot Professor of Sociology and Psychology at the
Congregational College. He remained in Nottingham until his retirement in 1951
when he moved back to Scotland and was a Congregational minister in Edinburgh.
As for young
Ian he was educated at Nottingham High School and then Yale University, though
quite how and why he ended up at Yale remains unclear. Returning to England he was active in amateur
dramatics in Nottingham and went on to study at RADA. He made his first professional
stage appearance in 1936 at the Old Vic in the Jacobean play The Witch of Edmonton where he was in
the illustrious company of Edith Evans, Marius Goring and Michael Redgrave. He
then spent three years in touring companies and in rep at Northampton and
Worthing.
McKenzie
made his first radio broadcast in May 1935 when he was also working as an
Assistant Producer for the Nottingham Pageant. On the BBC Midland Regional
Programme he spoke in the Signposts
series on To the Dukeries. He was
back on air the following month on Children’s
Hour reading Mr Binns’s Oak Tree,
a story from the Pageant written by Clare Chapman.
His big
break into theatre came with the tour of the new play George and Margaret in 1937/38 with a cast that included John
Arnatt, who’d been at RADA with Howard, and Eric Messiter, uncle of Ian
Messiter, the creator of Just a Minute.
Betty Kelly
became the first Mrs Howard when they married in 1938. She was the sister of
actress Judy Kelly who appeared in nearly 50 films including the 1940 version
of George and Margaret.
In September
1939 he decided to produce and direct a touring version of the W.A. Darlington
play Alf’s Button about a British
soldier who comes across a magic button which summons a genie to grant his
wishes. This updated version starred Wally Patch, Hal Walters and Mavis Claire.
However, the tour was the start of McKenzie’s financial woes, as he later
admitted that it opened on the same day that war broke out and he lost £1,300
in six weeks. The fact that a comedy film version Alf’s Button Afloat, starring the Crazy Gang and including Wally
Patch in the cast, was still showing in provincial cinemas at the same time can
hardly have helped at the box office.
In late 1939
an invitation to appear in My Dear
Children, John Barrymore’s last Broadway production before his death, took McKenzie
back to the States. At the end of the play’s run Billboard magazine reported that he was ‘in town eyeing film and
radio possibilities’. He ended going over to Hollywood where he tried his hand
at script-writing. He wrote for Sam Goldwyn and worked on the script of
Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and
did dialogue for other films.
On his
return to England he was rejected from military service on medical grounds and
his career started to take a different turn when comedian Oliver Wakefield –
billed as ‘The Voice of Inexperience’ – suggested he forsake drama for comedy.
Following this advice he wrote himself an act, changed his name to Michael
Howard and managed to get an audition with Vivian Van Damm to appear at London’s
Windmill Theatre. Over a couple of years he appeared in about a dozen different
editions of Revudeville, the daily
shows that would be changed every few weeks with new routines, perhaps a
different cast and new ‘tableaux vivant’, as the infamous nude poses were
known. The Daily Herald described
Howard as "a prim, spectacled young man with lapses into raciness"
(11 July 1942). As well as solo turns he performed in sketches and a ‘smart
patter and dance act’ with Valerie Tandy. In his solo turns “he chatters away
in an inconsequently amusing way to an accompaniment of laughter” (The Stage, 17 September 1942).
His work at
The Windmill didn’t go unnoticed by the BBC and in April 1943 he was back on
the radio in an edition of Break for
Music, an ENSA lunchtime concert series for war-workers broadcast from a
factory canteen, a sort of ENSA equivalent of Workers’ Playtime. Further radio spots followed that year in ENSA Half-Hour, Anzac Hour and Navy Mixture,
which he continued to make guest appearances on until 1947. In 1944 and early
1945 he was engaged as Master of Ceremonies on the General Forces Programme
show Twelve
Man and a Girl ‘twenty minutes of music in the modern way’, more Break for Music gigs and the first of
many appearances on the long-running Music-Hall.
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| Howard as Archie, part of the Bren Gun Carrier unit led by Dennis Price's character Sgt. Peter Gibbs in A Canterbury Tale |
In the summer of 1943 Howard made a brief return to acting - playing the part of Archie in the Army tank crew - when filming started for Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (the film was premiered the following May). He would go on to appear in another seven films: playing a Nazi spy in I See a Dark Stranger (1946), newspaper reporter Slopey Collins in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Alf in the second feature A Sister to Assist ‘Er (1948), another newspaper reporter in Front Page Story (1954), an airport official in Out of the Clouds (1955), a sailor in The Baby and the Battleship (1956) and finally as a member of the ship’s crew who meets with a sticky end in The Golden Rendezvous (1977).
Meanwhile
back in the theatre, in December 1943 he made his Palladium debut in George
Black’s Look Who’s Here with Howard
making an impression as ‘a nonchalant topical chatterer’ who also introduced an
impressive line-up of acts that included Old Mother Riley and Kitty McShane,
The Cairoli Brothers, Cyril Fletcher, Binnie Hale and the dexterous
piano-playing duo Rawicz and Landauer.
In late 1943
and early 1944 Howard also appeared at various venues for the Bernard Delfont
produced variety show Clap Hands and
Smile This show starred Charlie Kunz ‘radio’s wizard on the piano’ (his
theme song Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie
providing the inspiration for the title), Nosmo King, ventriloquist Arthur
Worsley and the dance act of Ray & Maxin, this being Eileen ‘Ray’ Johnson
and Ernest Maxin. Maxin had also worked at the Windmill and years later would
produce Morecambe and Wise’s shows for the BBC. In 1944 Howard also toured with
Joe Loss and his Band, appeared in the revue Artistes and Models with dancers Gaston and Andree, the plate spinner
and contortionist Eva May Wong and, for some shows, Doris Hare. He ended the
year in the magical revue Cavalcade of
Mystery starring magician Cecil Lyle, aka The Great Lyle.
1945 was the
year that Michael Howard was finally given his own star vehicle on the radio
with the start of an impressive twenty show run of The Michael Howard Show, broadcast on the Home Service from 4
August. The cast included actors Wilfred Babbage and Norman Wooland and singers
Pat Rignold and Phyllis Robins. So successful was his show that after just a
few weeks it was moved from Saturday lunchtimes to Tuesday evening in the slot
previously occupied by The Will Hay
Programme. Mind you, it wasn’t universally appreciated as the review in the
Daily Mirror concluded it ‘has good
points but once more it seems based on the American idea of guying the leading
man, plus the introduction of a dumb blonde, plus a film burlesque.’ Describing
his act Mark Lewisohn, in the BBC Comedy
Guide, said ‘his stage persona was that of a man who had wandered into the
wrong place but was determined to carry on as if he had made no mistake, while
his stage patter often had the air of a shaggy-dog story’. Also, in November of
that year, Howard made a whistle-stop visit to the States to record several
programmes for broadcast by various stations.
The success of the radio show led theatrical impresarios George and Alfred Black to organise a stage version of it for a six month provincial tour in 1946. Billed as The Michael Howard Show he was accompanied by impressionist Joyce Golding, The Millionaire Magician, singers and mimics Max and Harry Nesbitt, acrobats Desmond and Marks, the singing and dancing duo of Kim Kendall and Patricia Stainer and comedian Peter Dare. For some reason (perhaps objections from the BBC) mid-tour the title was changed to Black Scandals.
More radio
work followed in 1947 such as Can You
Beat It?, a comedy show based on the American series Can You Top This?, in which ‘three comedians try to beat listeners’
stories with the studio audience acting as judges’. Howard was a regular guest
comedian for the first series in 1947 and the second between September 1950 and
July 1951. Others appearing included Norman Long, Horace Percival, Jon Pertwee,
Terry-Thomas, Bob Monkhouse and Charlie Chester.
Other BBC
shows in the 1940s were Leave It to the
Boys (1947-48), where the ‘boys’ were Michael Howard and Scottish singer
Monte Rey (real name James Fyfe) who were ‘willing to undertake or overtake
anything’. The cast comprised Peter Butterworth, Ann Lancaster, Gwen Lewis,
Dick Francis (the actor, not the jockey) and a young Petula Clark, performing
scripts by Talbot Rothwell, long before his Carry
On writing days. There were comedy spots on Variety Bandbox (1948-52), the northern variety show Fanfare (1949) and as part of the cast
for a series starring Elsie and Doris Waters titled Petticoat Lane. The premise was that their characters of Gert and
Daisy would tour the market, making their way from stall to stall to ‘meet
unexpected people in the most unexpected places’. Also in the show was Max Wall
and Benny Hill.
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| Peggy Evans and Michael Howard married at the Congregational Church in Ealing on 4 June 1949 |
Howard was sometimes likened to ‘the English Bob Hope’ and this was surely enforced by his appearance in the melodrama The Cat and the Canary, a comedy film version of which Hope had the star role, in the 1939 Paramount Pictures release. Howard would play Paul Jones in a short run at London’s Q Theatre in December 1946, a role he’d reprise in 1948-49, 1954 and 1966, with two of the productions directed by Arnold Ridley. It was on the 1948-49 tour of The Cat and the Canary that he met his second wife Peggy Evans, who was playing the role of Annabelle West. Peggy had been trained at the Rank ‘charm school’ and is now best known as Dirk Bogarde’s girlfriend, Diana Lewis, in The Blue Lamp, with Bogarde as the young thug who fatally shoots PC George Dixon. By January 1949, just three months into the show’s run Howard was divorced from Betty Kelly and five months later he married Peggy Evans followed by a honeymoon ‘somewhere in Scotland.’
Many reviews
of The Cat and the Canary noted that
Howard would usually end each performance with an amusing curtain call with his
‘nonsensical patter’. One newspaper reported that a woman in the stalls of
Dartford’s Scala Theatre laughed so ‘heartily’ at Howard’s performance in the
show that she lost her false teeth which fell under the seat and that ‘she
recovered them the next day.’
Dramatic
stage roles continued throughout his career including And So to Bed (1947), The Man
at Six (1947) which included a young Patrick Macnee in the cast, two tours
of Once Upon a Crime (1948 &
1959) an update by Talbot Rothwell of George M. Cohen’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, J.B. Priestley’s Duet in Floodlight (1949), co-starring with Peggy Evans in Beggar My Neighbour (1951-52) a new play
written by Arnold Ridley, Dear Delinquent
(1958), Bogey 7 (1963) and Sleeping Partners (1967-68), more on that
particular play later.
Michael
Howard’s obituary in The Stage
referred to his ‘chaotic personal life’ and certainly throughout most the 1950s
and into the 60s he was no stranger to the inside of a court house. In December
1949 a case was heard at Nottingham County Court for non-payment of a bill for
theatrical photographs with Howard ordered to pay the sum of nearly £27 plus
costs. In January 1950 it was the turn of Brentford County Court to judge on
the matter of unpaid hotel expenses accumulated in Ramsgate in the summer of
1948. In June 1951 he was declared bankrupt by the Official Receiver with debts
totalling £9,570, mostly to the Inland Revenue, (see Note 1). He would later
attribute this to his “unjustifiable extravagance” and that he had been unable
to get work, saying that his earnings had dropped from £15,000 to £47 a year.
In the Spring of 1952 a case was heard by Westminster County Court for arrears
of an unpaid maintenance order for his first wife. In June 1953 he was before
the beak in Bath, again on the charges of obtaining credit, this time when
hiring a car in the town. In July 1959 it was the turn of his second wife to
claim for more than £200 unpaid alimony and child maintenance, a suspended
committal order of 28 days was made provided the arrears were paid off. He was
made bankrupt again in 1961; the liabilities were substantially those of the
earlier order. In November 1961 it was
the turn of the Bow Street Magistrates to commit him for trial on seven charges
of obtaining credit and to refuse bail as he ‘jumped his bail’ and fled the
country for three months earlier that summer. (Note 2) The following month he
was sentenced to 12 months in prison, spending Christmas in Wormwood Scrubs
before serving the remainder of his time at the Spring Hill open prison in
Buckinghamshire. It wasn’t until April 1967 that he was finally discharged from
bankruptcy proceedings. At the time he said that his earnings for the previous
five years totalled £955. Leaving the court he told reporters that “it had been
a millstone around my neck. Now I can face the future and start a new life. I
have a number of offers open to me”.
Meanwhile another radio star vehicle followed in 1949 with Here’s Howard. A pilot episode was broadcast in the Star Parade series in May 1949 and was given the green light for a full series of thirty shows starting in September that year. The pilot, produced by Leslie Bridgemont and written by Laurie Wyman of The Navy Lark fame, featured Richard Dimbleby, Jean Kent, Lionel Stevens, Norman Shelly and, in her first broadcast, Pat Coombs. Coombs. Shelley and Stevens would be joined by Doris Nichols for the Home Service series. It was Wyman’s first major radio script-writing assignment, though for the Star Parade pilot it was reported that he’d been ‘recalled to the Army to finish his service’ and that he’d be ‘listening in barracks’. Reviewing the first show Ken Findon in Reveille wrote that ‘it was particularly memorable for its brilliant script’ and that ‘his first effort displayed with and originality comparable to Take It From Here’” A second shorter series of Here’s Howard, this time on the Light Programme, followed in July 1950.
Unfortunately
none of Michael Howard’s own shows were retained by BBC Sound Archives.
However, his act has survived in two variety shows that did get kept. The hour
long Variety Parade was recorded on 2
May 1945 just ahead of broadcast for the VE celebrations the following week.
The main acts were Tommy Handley and Arthur Askey. Also committed to disc was The Big Show, a 90-minute extravaganza
that was a joint BBC and NBC production broadcast on the Light on 16 September
1951. Stars from the States and the UK performed at the Palladium, stars such
as Tallulah Bankhead (who presented the regular show on the NBC radio network
from 1950 to 1952), Fred Allen, George Sanders, Beatrice Lillie, Vera Lynn, Jack
Buchanan (a last minute replacement for Wilfred Pickles), Robb Wilton and, of
course, Michael Howard. It also meant that, for the first and only time, Howard
made the cover of the Radio Times.
Television had first beckoned Michael Howard in 1948 when he introduced a couple of episodes of the variety show New to You but it wasn’t until 1951 that he got his first (and only) series which borrowed the title, if not the format, from his last radio outing, Here’s Howard. The programme was commissioned to fill the slot vacated by Terry-Thomas who’d gone off to America without accepting the offer of a return series. It would be a fortnightly show, the norm for many programmes at that time. The Radio Times billing rather cryptically told us that it would star Michael Howard with ‘some friends who prefer to remain anonymous’. A press preview offered a little more insight and that each show would start with Howard ‘alone in the studio. Then, when he gets chatting, the scene will dissolve into his meeting place with some well-know personality. To preserve the element of surprise we shall not know in advance whom we are to see; but ... they will be chosen widely and not necessarily from the entertainment world.’ At the end of the first show announcer Sylvia Peters told viewers that Michael Howard had been performing with a cracked rib. Earlier that day he’d tripped against a table in his West End flat and sustained the injury so for the live broadcast he’d been strapped up and a nurse was on standby on the set.
The
choreographer for Here’s Howard was
Irving Davies. Producing was ex-Variety Bandbox
producer Bryan Sears for what his first television assignment. Head of light
entertainment Ronnie Waldman explained what would become a perennial problem
for TV executives in that “Here’s Howard
will be the final test of whether a show which makes good on sound can be
adapted to make good TV”. However, his conclusion didn’t auger well for the
series when he said “so far, radio shows have not proved much of a success on
vision”. He was right, the series ran for eight shows and never returned. At least one TV reviewer saw the series as ‘disappointing’
with Howard ‘as an example of the intimate type of comedian (who) ought to
conquer the limitations of the television screen, but his scripts do not blaze
with fun and humour.’ (Birmingham Mail
16.5.61) At the start of each show Howard would tell his gags lolling against a
No Smoking sign. The only other clues as to who and what was on the series I
can find are appearances from actor Reginald Purdell, that well-known
personality Gilbert Harding, a Parisian dance sequence and a spoof on Sanders of the River.
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| The Radio Times (3 August 1951) previews the new series of Dear Me |
The next radio outing was in the hands of a master of comedy scripting, Ted Kavanagh, writer of ITMA. For Dear Me, which aired on the Light Programme over eight episodes in the summer of 1951, the premise was that Michael Howard is supposedly working on his autobiography. In a touch of nepotism cast as his secretary was his wife Peggy Evans. Tony Hancock was in the unaired pilot recording but he wasn’t to star in the series as he sounded too much like Howard, and anyway, by the time the series started he was otherwise engaged on Happy-Go-Lucky and the second series of Educating Archie. Appearing in Dear Me were Miriam Karlin, Clarence Wright and Horace Percival, both ITMA alumni, John Sharp, Reginald Purdell and David Jacobs. The reviews for Dear Me were mixed: ‘Mr Howard’s comedy is too mechanically efficient for an idea which depends on warmth for success’ (Daily Express, 9.8.51) ‘The opening effort lacked pace, but there were moments of good fun. Verdict: If Howard can soften his microphone manner – avoid the cynical and supercilious – Dear Me will endear itself to the listener.’ (Daily Mirror, 13.8.51) ‘It has all the tricks and topicalities. The burlesque of Twenty Questions was a superb piece of absurdity. I hope it will keep it with a different question every week.’ (Evening Despatch, 13.8.51)
And so,
after a decade in the limelight Michael Howard hit the lean years. It’s likely
that Michael Howard’s name was tainted by bankruptcy case – which had fallen
between the end of Here’s Howard and
the start of Dear Me – and other
court appearances. Between 1952 and the autumn of 1956 there were few regular
radio or TV engagements. For BBC radio he was on Variety Fanfare a few times in 1952 and there was also Workers’ Playtime (three appearances
between 1953 and 1960) plus nineteen turns on Midday Music Hall (1956-61), with Bill Worsley (first husband of
Beryl Reid) being the only producer to stay loyal to Howard.
Stage work
kept Howard moderately busy in the early 50s. In 1951 there was a tour of All the Fun of the Air with Jimmy
Wheeler, Charmain Innes and Dick Henderson (father of Dickie Henderson) and
later variety dates with singer Steve Conway with Howard billed as 'Radio's
Favourite Comedian No. 864-5-6-87'. The
following year he worked with impressionist Peter Cavanagh, 'the Voice of them
all' in Count Your Blessings and in
1953 the farce The Perfect Woman with
Peggy Evans, Irene Handl and Sonnie Hale. In 1954 yet another revival of The Cat and the Canary, again
co-starring Peggy and then it was up to Scotland to compere the Rikki Fulton
written revue On the Tiles. That same
year life was almost imitating art as not only was he a reporter in the film Front Page Story but also started to
write a weekly column for Edinburgh's Evening
Dispatch newspaper.
1955 proved
to be something of a performing desert for Howard with no stage, radio or
television engagements. It wasn't until
a chance meeting with another ex-Windmill Theatre comic in September 1956 that
Howard made his television comeback in the second series of ITV's Alfred Marks Time. Clifford Davis, TV
critic for the Daily Mirror wrote: ‘Remember
him? The diffident, spectacled comedian husband of actress Peggy Evans. His
dry, whimsical way with a story took him to the London Palladium ... but
financial troubles ended in bankruptcy...and Howard quit show business as a
performer. A chance meeting in Bond Street with comedian Alfred Marks resulted
in Michael being booked for the opening edition of tonight’s series. He has two
character parts in sketches – as a surgeon with Eunice Gayson as his nurse, and
as the dwarf artist Toulouse Lautrec. As Lautrec Howard will have to walk on
his knees. ‘That’s show business,’ he quips. ‘I’ve had to get down on my knees
to get back.’
Howard’s
film knowledge was put to use in the Light Programme series The Peers Parade. Broadcast in the
summer of 1957 it starred singer Donald Peers, who had been absent from British
shores for over two years in Australia, with each hour long show promising
‘personalities from the entertainment world’ and a regular cast of Dick Emery,
Miriam Karlin, Ann Lancaster, organist Harold Smart and Cliff Adams with the
Show Band Singers. One feature was Picture
Puzzles, a four round contest of movie knowledge and Howard was engaged as
the ‘referee’ on most editions. It was, in the words of one critic ‘the return
of another star from the wilderness.’
After that
flurry of activity it was mainly stage acting work that followed but Michael
Howard’s name did occasionally pop up in the Radio Times on programmes such as Does the Team Think? (1958 and 1960), Startime (1964-65), A Night
at the Music Hall (1966) with Howard billed as 'the Eminent Raconteur' and
the showbiz quiz Sounds Familiar
(1967) where he was joined on the panel by his then girlfriend Dawn Addams. In
November 1965 there was an attempt to rehabilitate Michael Howard's name in an
edition of Comedy Parade called Mike to Mike, written by Howard and
produced by Bill Worsley. An introductory article in the Radio Times explained more:
Tonight’s star, that dry wit Michael Howard, can certainly claim that Mike to Mike is custom-made to fit, for he wrote it himself. He plays a radio comedian in search of a fashionable gimmick, an image for his new show. It’s a quest that leads him through some crafty verbal gymnastics into a series of bizarre situations, including a visit to the Turkish baths and a magistrates’ court, and encounters with Doctor Who, a psychiatrist, and a nightclub owner called Bubbles. Where all this gets Howard – with the connivance of Graham Stark, Sheila Buxton and Clovissa Newcombe – is to be disclosed at first hand and heart-to-heart in Mike to Mike.
One assumes
that his various appearances in front on magistrates informed some of this
script. There was no follow-up series. His final radio appearances were on
Radio 2's Variety Club in July 1979
and January 1980.
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| Signing the contract for Bogey 7 (The Stage, 2 May 1963) |
Back on the stage there was the comedy thriller Time Murderer Please (1957) with his old Alf's Button pal Wally Patch and a long tour with Carol Austin in Jack Popplewell's comedy Dear Delinquent (1958). His friend Talbot Rothwell, who was also godfather to Michael's daughter Harriett, provided a couple of play scripts, the previously mentioned Once Upon a Crime (1959) and Bogey 7 (1963). This play tells of a journalist who makes a bet that he can write a thriller in 24 hours. Howard told the press: “Getting the role in Bogey 7 has been the greatest thrill of my life. Since I came out of jail last August all my show business friends have been wonderful to me.”
The Cat and the Canary continued to play an
important role in Howard’s life, and it was a 1966 revival that thrust him into
the public eye again when he fell head over heels in love with his leading lady
Dawn Addams who, like Peggy Evans nearly two decades earlier, was playing the
role of Annabelle West. The only problem was that both were married, Howard to
his third wife June Davis (Note 3), and Addams to an Italian Prince named Don
Vittorio Emanuele Massimo, although they had separated in 1958. Dawn even changed
her surname to Howard saying “I did it because I love Michael Howard and
because we are both unable to marry at the moment”.
 |
| Dawn Addams as Magda Vamoff in a 1963 episode of The Saint |
British-born actress Dawn Addams had signed a seven-year contract with MGM and starred in a number of Hollywood films during the 1950s. But by the 1960s she was mainly working in television, you'll spot her in old episodes of The Saint and other ITC programmes when they crop up on ITV4. Her last role was as Mrs Landers in 26 episodes of the BBC North Sea ferry-based soap Triangle.
Meanwhile,
in March 1966, Dawn was in the news when
it was reported that she was involved in a custody battle with her estranged
husband over their son Stefano and that she had also adopted a baby boy. Later
that year it was reported that the baby, called Sean, was in fact not adopted
and was Dawn’s and that identity of the father had not been disclosed when the
birth was registered. Tragically Sean died in November of that year from
bronchial pneumonia aged just eight months old. Hours later she was back on
stage at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre for the next performance of The Cat and the Canary.
Howard and
Addams worked together again at the Bristol Hippodrome in, appropriately enough, Sleeping Partners (Note 4) by which
time Howard was now divorced from June, living with Dawn in Putney and mainly
working as a theatrical impresario. In late 1967 Howard sold his story,
presumably to top-up dwindling funds, to The
People who serialised it over three Sundays. (Note 5). They worked together
again in a 1970 Richmond Theatre production of The Little Hut but by the end of the year they had announced their
separation.
In 1973, now
aged 57, there was yet another actress in his life, this time Gretta Gouriet,
some 33 years his junior. Howard proposed to her but as Gouriet told the Daily Express “I need a few more days to
think about it. The chances are about 50-50”. In the event the chances were
zero.
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| His Inner London Crown Court appearance reported in the Liverpool Daily Post 22 October 1974 |
The following year he was embroiled in more legal problems when he was given an 18-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, after admitting writing out cheques worth £1,188 knowing that his bank would not honour them. Howard told the court that he’d reached “absolute bottom” after two (sic) divorces and two suicide attempts.
In later
years Howard returned to his first love of acting with occasional stage roles in
fringe theatre productions and even a return to television. In March 1979 he
appeared at the Bush Theatre in a production of Independence by the Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura.
Concerning the aftermath of colonial oppression in the West Indies, Howard was
cast as an ex-governor. In May 1979 he played German politician Wilhelm
Liebknecht in the political drama Landscape
in Exile by David Zane Mairowitz produced by the Foco Novo theatre company
at the Half Moon in Whitechapel.
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| Michael Howard with George Waring in LWT's Mixed Blessings (1980) |
In 1980 he appeared in an episode of the LWT sitcom Mixed Blessings. For the BBC he popped up in a 1981 episode of the medical drama Angels and the 1983 Alex Shearer comedy series The Climber. His final tv role was in 1986 as the inebriated Mr Davenport in an episode of the Roy Clarke comedy series The Clairvoyant where he starred alongside Roy Kinnear, Sandra Dickinson and Hugh Lloyd. (Note 6).
In 1988 it
was announced that Michael Howard had died on 18 February at the Mount Vernon
Hospital in Middlesex. He was aged 71. His funeral service was held a week
later at the Breakspear Crematorium. An obituary in The Times described him as having a ‘dry, fatalistic humour’ that
made him a leading radio comedian of the 1940s and 1950s. The Daily Telegraph added how in more recent
years ‘he was best known for his numerous appearances in law courts, usually
for financial reasons but occasionally for matrimonial or alcoholic ones’. (Note 7) The
Stage described him as ‘almost a precursor of what has come to be called
alternative comedy, for his style of humour was considerably removed from that
of the gagsters and sketch performers of the forties and fifties and he never
fitted well into the variety scene which was the main outlet for comedians in
those days’. Back in his native Halifax the Evening
Courier said that he had been largely forgotten in the area and ‘by the
nation at large too, because he was a controversial star who discovered how
tough life can be in the glare of publicity’.
Michael
Howard 1916-1988
Note 1: the
whole tax investigation is supposed to have started when Tommy Handley died in
1949 with an estate valued at £63,000. Tax inspectors started to look at the financial
affairs of other entertainers, and that included Michael Howard. According to
Howard he was told “they’re looking for a scapegoat, and it looks like you’re
it”. It is said that whilst he was earning up to £150 a week in the eight years
between 1943 and 1951 he’d only paid £50 in tax. Others investigated or who
were made bankrupt included comedian Hal Monty, actress Hermione Baddeley,
Arthur ‘Old Mother Riley’ Lucan, Valentine ‘The Man in Black’ Dyall, and actor
Robert Newton.
Note 2:
Apparently Interpol were searching for Howard who had fled first to Belgium
then on to Luxembourg and finally France. Holed up in an hotel in Paris, and
using a false name, he answered an advert asking for English speaking actors to
dub foreign films.
Note 3: Howard
had married June Davis, described in press reports as a ‘32 year old widow’ in
June 1963 but they had divorced by November 1967 on the grounds of adultery.
This was the case with his previous marriages: he was divorced from Betty in
January 1949 when the divorce petition cited adultery ‘in a Morecambe hotel’
with Peggy Evans. His divorce from Peggy came in January 1961, this time the
co-respondent was Sally Cooper, daughter of Dame Gladys Cooper. The marriages
produced three children: daughter Harriet (born 1939) with Betty and son Ian
(born May 1950) and daughter Annabelle with Peggy.
Note 4:
Legal proceedings reared their head yet again, this time over copyright
infringement for Sleeping Partners. A
High Court writ was issued against both Howard and Addams over their provincial
tour of the play by the widow of Sir Edward Seymour Hicks who had adapted it
from Sacha Guitry’s play Faison un Rêve. An out of
court settlement was reached.
Note 5: Dawn
would also tell her story to The People
in January 1970. She also revealed that the father of young Sean was an Italian
businessman called Vieri Calamai who she had been introduced to in Rome and
that “we spent rather more time in each other’s company than perhaps we should
have done.”
Note 6: Three
of these tv appearances are on YouTube. He's a far from politically correct
hotel guest in series 3 episode 2 of Mixed
Blessings. He plays office worker Mr Pilbeam, yet another character that's
fond of the bottle, in episode 4 of The Climber.
Finally he appears in episode 3 of The
Clairvoyant.
Note 7: Both
the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Courier report that he wrote an
autobiography in 1973 called Dusk to Dawn
but I can find no reference to it elsewhere.
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