Wasn't he so loverly?

Wilfrid Hyde-White was as charming and mischievous in real life as in My Fair Lady, remembers Simon Williams, his friend and co-star

- Simon Williams

A hundred years ago, two would-be actors – my father, Hugh Williams (1904-69), hotfoot from Haileybury, and Wilfrid Hyde-White (1903-91), just out of Marlborough, were new boys at RADA.

They became flatmates – and lifelong friends.

Forty-nine years later, when I rang Wilfrid to ask him if he’d do the address at my father’s memorial service, he answered wistfully, ‘Oh, my dear boy, I simply can’t – we shared a dinner jacket for three years at RADA’ (they had to take it in turns to go nightclubbing.)

Thereafter, he’d always send me a telegram on the anniversary of Dad’s death – sometimes with a racing tip.

As RADA students, during an elocution class, they were made endlessly to repeat ‘hip-bath’ – a short sound and then a long one. Wilfrid dared Dad to substitute ‘toilet roll’, and they were both sent out of the room for giggling. Wilfrid claimed RADA taught him two things: ‘That I can’t act and it doesn’t matter.’

In any event, voice production was wasted on Wilfrid – he was famously inaudible, choosing to perfect a mumbling naturalistic delivery. His performance as Colonel Pickering in the film of My Fair Lady (1965) is a masterclass of muttering nonchalance. When he was doing The Reluctant Debutante with Celia Johnson, she told him, ‘The only time I can actually hear you, Wilfrid, is when I’m on stage and you’re chatting in the wings.’