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Norman Wisdom

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Sir Norman Wisdom, OBE (born 4 February, 1915) is an English comedian, singer and actor.

Early life

Norman Wisdom was born in the London district of Marylebone to Frederick and Maude Wisdom. His father was a chauffeur and his mother a dressmaker. After a difficult and poverty-stricken childhood he joined the 10th Hussars and began to develop his talents as a musician and stage entertainer. Wisdom’s mother left home when he was nine, and he and his brother were left in the charge of a father. Wisdom ran away from home when he was 11, but returned to become an errand boy with a grocery store on leaving school at 13. Later he was a coal-miner, a waiter, a pageboy and a cabin-boy, before joining the army and seeing service in India. Leaving in 1946, he made his debut as an entertainer at the advanced age of 31 - but his rise to the top was phenomenally fast after that. A West End star within two years, he made his TV debut the same year and was soon commanding enormous audiences. By this time, he had adopted the suit that would remain his trademark - tweed cap askew with peak turned up, too-tight jacket, barely-better trousers, crumpled collar and tie awry. The character known as "the gump" was to dominate Wisdom's film career.

File:Norman Wisdom photo.jpg
Norman Wisdom.

Film career

Wisdom made a series of low-budget star-vehicle comedys for the Rank Organisation, beginning with Trouble in Store in 1953. Their cheerful, undemanding character make them the direct descendants of the films made a generation earlier by George Formby. Never highly thought of by critics, they were very popular with domestic audiences, and in some notionally unlikely overseas markets, helping Rank stay afloat financially when more expensive film projects were unsuccessful.

The films usually involved the Gump character in some manual occupation, in which he is barely competent, and a junior position to a "straight man" superior, often played by Edward Chapman. They benefitted from Wisdom's capacity for physical slapstick comedy and his skill at creating a sense of the character's helplessness. The series' often contained a romantic subplot; the Gump's inevitable awkwardness with women is a characteristic shared with the earlier Formby vehicles.

By the mid-sixties, despite a move to filming in colour, Wisdom's commercial appeal was in eclipse. The obvious incongruity of a fifty-year old man playing the Prime Minister's grandson in Press for Time (1966) - though Wisdom's actual year of birth was inaccurarely recorded for many years - counted against him.

Later career

In 1967, Wisdom tried to change his career's direction by agreeing to perform a serious role in the American made The Night They Raided Minsky's, but it did not revive his career. By the early 'seventies his movie work had dried up, even though the earlier films were then peak-time viewing on British television.

He won critical acclaim in 1981 for his dramatic role of a dying cancer patient in the play Going Gently. On 11 February 1987 Norman Wisdom was the subject of Thames Television's This Is Your Life.

He became prominent again in the 1990s, helped by the young comedian Lee Evans, whose act was heavily influenced by Wisdom's work. The highpoint of this new popularity was the knighthood he received in 1999 from Queen Elizabeth II.

After he was knighted, true to his accident-prone persona, he couldn't resist pretending to trip on his way out off the platform.

A "Norman Wisdom moment"

On January 25 2006, Nick Flynn, a visitor at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England destroyed three Qing Dynasty Chinese porcelain vases worth approximately £500,000. He claimed to have tripped over his own shoelaces and called the accident a "Norman Wisdom moment" (that is, a moment of extreme clumsiness), although he was later arrested under suspicion of causing criminal damage.

Popularity in Albania

Norman Wisdom is a well-known and loved cult film icon in Albania and was the only Western actor whose films were allowed in the country during the Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Tony Hawks mentions this to much comic effect in his novel One Hit Wonderland when he is trying to secure an Albanian chart hit. He has been nicknamed "Pitkin" in Albania.

The archetypal Wisdom plot where the common working man gets the better of his bosses was considered ideologically sound by Hoxha. In 1995, he visited the post-Stalinist country, where to his surprise he was greeted by many appreciative fans and the then president of Albania, Sali Berisha.

Retirement

Norman Wisdom announced his retirement from the entertainment industry on 4 February, 2005. He intends to spend his retirement spending more time with his family, playing golf and driving around the Isle of Man, where he now lives (being a neighbour of John Rhys-Davies).

 
Norman Wisdom publicity shot B&W.

Trivia

Filmography

  • 1948 Film A Date with a Dream
  • 1948 to 1950 TV Wit and Wisdom
  • 1953 Film Trouble in Store
  • 1954 Film One Good Turn
  • 1955 Film As Long as They're Happy
  • 1955 Film Man of the Moment
  • 1956 Film Up in the World
  • 1957 Film Just My Luck
  • 1958 Film The Square Peg
  • 1959 Film Follow A Star
  • 1960 Film There Was a Crooked Man
  • 1960 Film The Bulldog Breed
  • 1962 Film On The Beat
  • 1962 Film The Girl on the Boat
  • 1963 Film A Stitch in Time
  • 1965 Film The Early Bird
  • 1966 Film The Sandwich Man
  • 1966 Film Press for Time
  • 1967 TV Androcles and the Lion
  • 1968 Film The Night They Raided Minsky's (The Night They Invented Striptease)
  • 1969 Film What's Good for the Goose (Girl Trouble)
  • 1970 TV Norman
  • 1970 TV Music Hall
  • 1973 TV Nobody Is Norman Wisdom
  • 1974 TV A Little Bit of Wisdom
  • 1981 TV BBC PlayHouse : Going Gently
  • 1988 TV The 1950's: Music, Memories & Milestones
  • 1992 TV Double X: The Name of the Game (Double X, Run Rabbit Run)
  • 1994 TV Last of the Summer Wine - The Man Who Nearly Knew Pavarotti
  • 1998 TV Where On Earth Is ... Katy Manning
  • 2000 TV Last of the Summer Wine - The Coming of the Beast
  • 2002 TV Last of the Summer Wine - A Musical Passing for a Miserable Muscroft
  • 2002 TV Dalziel and Pascoe - Mens Sana
  • 2003 TV Between the Sheets
  • 2004 TV Five Children and It

CDs and Vinyl

  • The Very Best of Norman Wisdom
  • Wisdom of a Fool
  • Nobody's Fool
  • Follow A Star
  • 1957 Original Chart Hits
  • Follow A Star/Give Me A Night In June
  • Happy Ending/The Wisdom Of A Fool
  • Big in Albania - One Hit Wonderland

Books

  • Lucky Little Devil: Norman Wisdom on the Island He's Made His Home (2004)
  • My Turn: Autobiography (2002)
  • Don't Laugh At Me / Cos I'm A Fool (1992) (two volumes of autobiography)

Norman also played a big part in the Tony Hawks book, One Hit Wonderland. Tony and Norman had a top twenty hit in Albania in 2002 with a song called "Big in Albania" written by Hawks and Oscar winning lyricist Tim Rice.

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