Peter Wyngarde

Fans of the Austin Powers movies take note -- your favorite satirical character had a direct source: master spy Jason King as played by Peter Wyngarde. The stage, television, and movie veteran, whose work goes back to the 1940s, has played a multitude of roles in a vast range of works, but has found only one such part that ever took with the public -- that of the foppish author, investigator, and counter spy Jason King, first in the series Department S and then in his own series, Jason King. The glib, rakish King spent two seasons helping to solve mysteries and save the free world while juggling an array of women.

Born Cyril Lewis Goldbert in Marseilles in 1933, Wyngarde had a French mother and an English father who was in the diplomatic service. As the son of a diplomat, Wyngarde spent his childhood moving around the world. The turning point in his early life came in 1941, when he was left in the care of another family in Shanghai just as the Japanese captured the city; he spent four brutal years in the Lung-Hai prison camp and more than a year recovering after the British liberated him. Wyngarde tried to accede to his parents' wishes by attending university, but instead he was drawn to acting. As early as 1946, he had small roles in touring productions, and in the second half of the 1940s, he worked in such plays as Macbeth (with Peggy Mount and Frank Woodfield), Deep Are the Roots, and The Winslow Boy.

Wyngarde's movie and television careers were as uneven as his stage career was busy and crowded. After a promising start, much of his work in the Spanish-shot epic Alexander the Great (1956) was cut from the final release print. Wyngarde managed to get a role in the short-lived television series Epilogue to Capricorn at the end of the 1950s, but it was the stage that kept him most busy. His New York stage debut came in 1959, in the award-winning Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh. Exposure from the play earned him various one-off television appearances. Wyngarde was very circumspect about his movie work after Alexander the Great, but among the films he did do in the 1960s were The Siege of Sidney Street (1960, based on the same incident that inspired the shoot-out at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934]), produced by Monty Berman; Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961); and Sidney Hayers' Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962). Among the more widely seen of his television appearances from the mid-'60s was his work in The Avengers episode "Epic," in which Wyngarde played an insane silent-era movie director who kidnaps Mrs. Emma Peel.

Lightning finally struck for Wyngarde in 1969 when he was cast in the ITC television series Department S, (produced by Monty Berman) in the role of Jason King, a well-spoken, sardonic, randy mystery author who works for a top-secret Interpol investigative unit. Sporting long hair and a flamboyant moustache, and clad in an array of late '60s/Swinging London-style cravats, ruffled shirts, crushed velvet outfits, kaftans, etc., Wyngarde was a veritable peacock. The character's eccentric mannerisms, coupled with his look, soon made Wyngarde the star of the show, eclipsing his two co-stars, Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols; indeed, many viewers felt that Wyngarde's character dressed more flashily than Nicols' character did. When looked at today, Jason King's manner of dress, coupled with his fierce sex drive and even the occasional use of such period terms as "groovy" makes him the very obvious model for Austin Powers. That went double in the series that was spun out of Department S, simply called Jason King, in which he operated solo but worked from bed-to-bed with a succession of women in seemingly every episode, keeping up a pace that even Sean Connery's James Bond would have had a hard time matching.

Jason King lasted a single season, but it became something of a pop-culture phenomenon and also an albatross around Wyngarde's neck. He was a heartthrob for lots of women viewers -- especially British housewives -- but he was never able to get another series. He was too closely identified with the role of Jason King; even in the mid-'70s, years after the show aired, his name turned up as part of a gag in a Monty Python sketch, in which lunch with Peter Wyngarde is part of a prize in a contest aimed at housewives. He returned to the stage, where he was as busy as ever, and his work continued to be diverse, including a major success in Butley. He made some film appearances as well, but didn't return to series television until the mid-'80s, when he played the villain in a four-part Doctor Who story, "Planet of Fire." The production of the Austin Powers movies, however, and the reissue of Department S on DVD in England and Australia ensured that the character of Jason King would not soon be forgotten, even as Wyngarde headed toward his seventh decade as an actor.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide