The Extraordinary Life of Peter Wyngarde, the Man Who Was Jason King

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Collage of Peter Wyngarde as Jason King in three stylish outfits, with title text The Extraordinary Life of Peter Wyngarde

In the early 1970s, there were very few people in Britain more famous than Peter Wyngarde. He was voted the country's best-dressed male personality two years running. When he touched down in Sydney on a promotional tour, around 30,000 women descended on the airport. It took him three days in hospital to recover. A 1970s survey of Australian women named him the man they'd most like to have lost their virginity to. His manager described him as, after Morecambe and Wise, the most requested and highest-paid celebrity in Britain for personal appearances. So many parents named their babies after his TV character that by 1971, Jason had become one of the most popular boys' names in the country.

Then a bus station in Gloucester took it all away.

Who Was Peter Wyngarde?

The short answer is: nobody really knows. That's not a figure of speech. Wyngarde spent decades constructing a version of himself that turned out to be largely fictional. He claimed to have been born in Marseille, the son of a British diplomat named Henry Wyngarde, and said he'd read Law at Oxford. His death certificate lists his birthplace as Singapore. No diplomat named Henry Wyngarde has ever been traced. Oxford has no record of him. His real name was almost certainly Cyril Goldbert, a fact only confirmed publicly when he appeared in court under it in 1975. His father wasn't a diplomat. He was a merchant seaman of Ukrainian heritage, his mother Eurasian. What is verifiable is that he spent much of his childhood in Shanghai, a fact that would shape him in ways he rarely talked about.

Four Years in a Japanese Internment Camp

When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in December 1941, the teenage Wyngarde was living with a Swiss family while his father was away on business. The soldiers came looking for British nationals and, despite his unconventional domestic arrangement, he was taken and interned at the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. He was roughly 14 years old. He'd stay for almost four years.

One of his fellow prisoners was J.G. Ballard, whose own experiences at Lunghua would later become the basis for Empire of the Sun, the novel Steven Spielberg adapted for the screen. Ballard remembered the young Wyngarde clearly, recalling him doing amateur dramatics in the camp. Wyngarde later claimed he had no memory of Ballard. That kind of selective amnesia would prove a recurring habit.

Conditions were grim. Food was scarce, morale collapsed, and blocks were kept deliberately isolated from each other. When prisoners managed to build a secret radio and pick up news from Free China, the young Wyngarde was used as a runner to carry bulletins between huts. A guard caught him. The punishment was having both feet broken with a rifle butt, followed by a spell in solitary confinement.

It was in the camp that he first started acting. He wrote his own stage adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and played both characters himself. The guards apparently enjoyed the shows. He later said he and the other prisoners coded secret messages into scripts. In their version of Macbeth, the main character stood in for Churchill, and major Allied victories were disguised as plot points. It sounds almost too theatrical to be true, which with Wyngarde is always a fair caveat.

Vivien Leigh, Alan Bates, and the Question of Who He Really Was

After liberation in 1945, Wyngarde made it to England and threw himself into acting without any formal training. By the late 1950s he was working at a high level. In 1958 he appeared alongside Vivien Leigh in Duel of Angels at the Apollo Theatre. They took the production to Broadway in 1960, where Wyngarde won a San Francisco Award for Best Actor and a Tony nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. He and Leigh became lovers after she ended her affair with Peter Finch. He later called her the love of his life.

Running parallel to this was a decade-long relationship with actor Alan Bates. The author Donald Spoto, in his biography of Bates, confirmed the two were in a relationship while flat-sharing through much of the 1960s. Wyngarde later described himself as "50% vegetarian, 100% bisexual," which in context reads less like a witty deflection and more like the closest thing to honesty he ever offered on the subject. He'd also been briefly married to actress Dorinda Stevens in the early 1950s. None of it fits a tidy narrative, which was probably the point. Like Lord Boothby, whose private life was an open secret in certain London circles for decades, Wyngarde operated in a world where what people knew and what they said publicly were two very different things.

There was also Bette Davis. Wyngarde told the story of being summoned to her dressing room at Pinewood Studios. From behind a plume of smoke, her opening line was: "I hear you have a big cock." She handed him a note: "Be here at 8.30." He claimed he declined. Whether the story is accurate in every detail is impossible to say, but it says something about the world he was moving in. He also said he fell in love with Felicity Kendal, who appeared in Jason King in 1971. Kendal remembered him as "a scream and great fun." Those are different kinds of memory.

Jason King and the Peak of It All

The character of Jason King came together in an accidental, very Wyngarde way. After a theatre production in 1968, he threw a dinner party, got drunk, and signed a contract to star in a new TV series. His agent called the next morning to inform him. Wyngarde couldn't remember any of it, but went to the meeting anyway. The original character, a pipe-smoking Oxford don, became Jason King: a bestselling crime novelist and part-time spy with a Zapata moustache, velvet smoking jackets, and silk shirts in colours that had no business existing. Wyngarde designed the suits himself with his London tailor. "Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast," he said later, "just as I did myself." He appeared in Department S first, then got his own spin-off series. Mike Myers has since confirmed the look fed directly into Austin Powers.

Before Jason King, Wyngarde had already built a serious cult following. His turn as the spectral Peter Quint in the 1961 horror film The Innocents is still discussed as one of the great understated horror performances. His episode of The Prisoner, 'Checkmate,' in which he plays Number Two, is considered one of the finest single episodes of that entire series. He appeared twice in The Avengers, was in The Champions and The Baron, and was consistently the most interesting person in whatever room he walked into on screen.

Morrissey, later of The Smiths, became obsessed with him during this period and tracked him down in later life. In his autobiography, Morrissey described visiting Wyngarde's flat as entering "an Edwardian warren of clerical ferocity," full of books and papers and typescripts half-finished and half-begun. He noted that Wyngarde's voice was still of great clarity, his eyes unchanged from his prime. It reads like a fan meeting a very elegant ghost. For another performer whose cultivated persona became bigger than the person behind it, Josephine Baker covers similar ground: the life you couldn't quite pin down, the myth you couldn't separate from the fact.

The X-Men Connection

While Wyngarde's real career was collapsing in the late 1970s, his alter ego was being immortalised in one of the most celebrated comic book storylines ever written. Chris Claremont and John Byrne named a villain 'Jason Wyngarde' in the X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga, explicitly modelling him on Wyngarde's Jason King performance. The character was Mastermind, a manipulative illusionist who seduces Jean Grey into joining the villainous Hellfire Club. The storyline ran in 1979 and 1980.

Wyngarde was, at roughly the same time, reportedly living on social security. There's something quietly devastating about that timing. The man himself had been reduced to occasional guest spots. His fictional shadow was headlining what would become one of the most reprinted comic runs in Marvel's history.

The Album Nobody Wanted to Admit They'd Heard

In 1970, at the height of his fame, Wyngarde recorded a self-titled album for RCA. The label reportedly expected it to fail and commissioned it largely as a tax write-off. It sold reasonably well on the back of his celebrity. Then people listened to it. The opening track sets up a seduction scenario in his bachelor's den. What follows includes a track called "Rape," in which Wyngarde offers a country-by-country tour of sexual violence, complete with female screams and xenophobic characterisations of various nationalities. There's also "Hippie and the Skinhead," a spoken-word piece about queer-bashing, and a country-western number called "Billy the Queer." RCA pulled the album after the first pressing and refused to issue more copies. It resurfaced decades later, reissued under the title When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. Original copies now sell at auction for hundreds of pounds.

Wyngarde's own view, offered in later interviews, was that the track was about all kinds of rape: bureaucratic, political, institutional. Whether that was a genuine artistic position or a very late attempt at damage control is something each listener gets to decide.

Gloucester Bus Station, 1975

In October 1975, Peter Wyngarde appeared in court under the name Cyril Goldbert, charged with gross indecency with a crane driver in the public toilets of Gloucester Bus Station. Homosexual acts between consenting adults had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967, but cottaging remained illegal and was still actively policed. He pleaded guilty. His solicitor told the court it had been a mental aberration brought on by excessive drinking. The fine was £75. It later emerged he'd received an official warning for something similar the year before. For a sense of how the British establishment treated men whose private lives didn't conform to what was expected, the Alan Turing story remains the starkest example on record.

The conviction ended his television career almost overnight. The tabloids made sure everyone knew what the man behind the moustache had actually been doing on a Saturday night. He later referred to the people who'd damaged his career as 'small-minded.' He never directly addressed the case beyond that. In July 2023, the conviction was quashed by the Home Office under legislation designed to clear historical convictions for consensual same-sex acts. It is now officially treated as if it never happened.

The Long Aftermath

TV work dried up almost entirely. He appeared sporadically: a Two Ronnies sketch, a Doctor Who guest role. His most substantial screen appearance after 1975 was in the 1980 Flash Gordon film, playing Klytus, head of Ming the Merciless' secret police. His face was hidden entirely behind a metal mask. He was recognisable only by his voice. By 1982 he was reportedly living on social security. He continued to work in theatre and showed up on chat shows when invited, always sharp and always evasive, and seemingly constitutionally incapable of a dull sentence. In later life he took up pistol shooting and entered national competitions. He quit drinking and smoking in the early 1980s, took up jogging, and went to the gym four times a week. He was, by all accounts, still performing right up to the end.

What the obituaries revealed in 2018, when he died at around 90 years old, was the full extent of how little anyone actually knew. The birthplace he couldn't agree on. The father who didn't exist. The Oxford degree nobody could find. He told journalists he genuinely didn't know the year of his birth. That particular claim might actually have been true. Like Coco Chanel, who spent decades reinventing her own origins, Wyngarde understood that a good persona is more durable than a true one. At least until it isn't.

He put it best himself, in an interview with Ray Connolly in 1973. 'As a child,' he said, 'it was difficult to differentiate sometimes between fact and fantasy.' He was talking about his childhood. He could have said it about his whole life.