Thursday 25 July 2013
Mel Smith obituary
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Mel Smith obituary
Mel
Smith was once upstaged by a talking gorilla.
He was playing a zoologist in a plan on his hit joke show Not the Nine O'Clock Newsand
the gorilla suit contained Rowan
Atkinson. "When I caught Gerald in 68 he was completely
wild," said Smith. "Wild?" retorted the gorilla.
"I was absolutely livid!"
If the gorilla had the best
line, Smith had the more communicative put up with, mugging with a deadpan
virtuosity rarely seen since Oliver
Hardy in his pomp.
That face – as hangdog as his childhood hero Tony Hancock's – made Smith, who
has died of a heart attack aged 60, one of the most recognisable
of postwar British comedians.
Smith's face was only part of
his fortune. He was a writer and editor of some of the most remarkable British
TV comedies of the 1980s and 90s. He directed films including The Tall Guy (1989), with Jeff
Goldblum andEmma Thompson, and the
box-office hit Bean (1997), an adaptation of Atkinson's TV series. As
co-founder, with Griff Rhys Jones, of Talkback Productions, he was a TV
producer to blame for innovative comedy series including Smack the Pony, Da Ali G Show and I'm Alan
Partridge. As an actor, he played a string of well-received roles,
but perhaps none more effectively than Winston
Churchill, opposite Michael Fassbender as the IRA leader Michael
Collins, in Mary Kenny's play Allegiance at the Edinburgh
festival in 2006.
Smith was born in Chiswick,
west London. His parents, Kenneth and Vera, ran the area's first gambling shop.
After studying at Latymer upper school in Hammersmith he went to New College,
Oxford, where he studied trial psychology, while many of his 80s TV
contemporaries – Rhys Jones, Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh
Laurie – were
finessing their skills in the well-established comedy nursery of Cambridge
Footlights.
As a member of the Oxford
University Dramatic humanity, Smith honed his theatrical and comedy competence
with a production of The Tempest in Oxford and shows at the Edinburgh
fringe. After graduation he worked in 1973 at the Royal Court theatre in London, as assistant director, and
at the Bristol Old Vic, before becoming assistant
director at the Sheffield Crucible in 1975. At one stage, he thought of ditch
theatre to turn into a bookmaker in his family's shop.
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