Peter Wyngarde

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Peter Paul Wyngarde (born August 23 1933) is a British actor best known for playing the character Jason King in two television series in the late 1960s early 1970s: Department S (1969-70) and Jason King (1971-72).

He was born in Marseille, France, the son of an English father and a French mother. His father worked for the British Diplomatic Service, and as a result his childhood was spent in a number of different countries. In 1941, while his parents were away in India, he went to stay with a Swiss family in Shanghai. When the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the city, they were captured and placed in the Lung-hai concentration camp. Conditions in the camp were sometimes harsh - on one occasion Peter had both his feet broken and spent two weeks in solitary confinement after being caught taking messages between camp huts.

As a young man he went into acting and from the mid 1950s had various roles acting in feature films, television plays and television series guest appearances. In the late 1960s he was a regular guest star on many of the popular UK series of the day - many of which were espionage adventure series - including The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron, The Champions, The Troubleshooters, Love Story, I Spy and The Man in Room 17. He also played the rotating guest-star role of the villanous Number Two in the episode Checkmate of the cult series The Prisoner, which took place in a community of spies who had retired... or been retired.

Wyngarde became a British household name through his starring role in the espionage series Department S (1969). After that series ended, his character, the suave womaniser Jason King, was spun-off into a new action espionage series entitled Jason King (1971), which ran for one season (26 one-hour episodes).

In 1975 he was arrested and convicted for an act of "gross indecency" with a truck driver in the toilets of Gloucester bus station. His career never recovered. After losing his TV celebrity status, Wyngarde worked in Austria, acting and directing at the English Theatre in Vienna, and in South Africa and Germany. He also landed the role of General Klytus in the film version of Flash Gordon, although it is perhaps significant that the part required him to wear a metal mask throughout.

During the 1980s and 1990s he made a number of TV appearances, including the Doctor Who serial Planet of Fire (1984), Hammer House Of Horror & Suspense (1986), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994) and the film Tank Malling (1989).

An enduring myth is that Wyngarde's real name is Cyril Louis Goldbert. This story had its genesis in the early 1970s when, in a newspaper interview Wyngarde was asked his real name and as a joke gave the name of his uncle, Louis Jouvet, himself a renowned French actor. The name not only stuck but was added to over the years.

[edit] Music

To cash in on his fame and appeal, RCA allowed him to record an album of songs entitled "When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head". Perhaps to their credit (at least in hindsight) but to some dismay at the time, Wyngarde did not deliver a bunch of easy listening standards but a most unusual collection of spoken word/ musical arrangements.^{[citation needed]} The LP is thought to have been quickly withdrawn after its release, but has gained cult status in the intervening years.^{[citation needed]}