Ron Moody

Died: June 11, 2015

Ron Moody, who has died aged 91, was an ebullient comic actor and performer who was famous for a role he accepted and another role he refused. The role he accepted was Fagin in Lionel Bart's musical version of Oliver Twist; the role he refused was the lead in Doctor Who - a decision he later regretted.

As Fagin, Moody was eccentric, funny and brilliant - in the original musical, on Broadway and in the movie version - and indeed his interpretation is still regarded as the definitive one - more memorable even than Alex Guinness's Fagin in David Lean's 1948 film.

It was not an easy creation though - even Lionel Bart himself at one point thought Moody's playing of the role was anti-Semitic and others thought Moody played up the comedy too much. Moody, though, saw Fagin as essentially a funny, Pan-like figure. "I knew him in my Jewish bones," he once said. "He was a funny character who would get laughs."

It was the desire for laughs that drove most of Moody's career. As a child, his hero was George Formby and his first experience as a performer was doing an impersonation of the Northern comic in a talent contest in a church hall in Haringey where Moody grew up.

Both his parents were Jewish and Moody remembers the family home being full of amateur performers ready to put on improvised shows in the front room, although his first interest was not acting but economics - after serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he went to the London School of Economics on an ex-serviceman's grant of £180 a year.

At first, as a working class boy, he felt a little intimidated by his surroundings at LSE, but he was devoted to the idea of an academic life and quickly became involved in student politics. That led to his involvement in drama and comedy and he began writing and performing for student shows. "On my first night on the stage," he said, "something happened to me. I think I was born."

It took some time before he made performing a reality however. He was at LSE for five years from 1948 until 1953 and was 29 before he became a professional performer. He had been spotted in one of his student shows, Holiday Farm, by an agent who suggested he should try writing for Frankie Howerd. It did not work out. As often happened, Howerd made a pass at him, and no work came of it.

Instead, Moody started to appear in revue and cabaret and his first big success was Intimacy at Eight, which opened in 1952 to good reviews. By now, he had taken up lessons in tap dancing and singing and was developing a reputation as a clown and an expert at shtick. He completed six years in revue before being cast in Candide, his first musical. It was a massive boost to his career and he started working in radio and television.

The role of Fagin came about while he was working on a musical called Saturnalia about the great Roman festival. From the start, Moody was determined his Fagin would be different, partly because he was uncomfortable with how the character had been portrayed in the past. In the original novel, he is pretty much an out-and-out villain, which was how he was usually portrayed on screen, but Bart's lyrics and music went a long way towards humanising him and Moody was eager to take that further and turn him into a much more sympathetic character.

The process of creating this new version was not easy. For a start, Moody did a lot of ad-libbing, which brought him into conflict with Bart. The composer also initially feared Moody's version of Fagin was anti-Semitic although he later changed his mind.

Moody also became embroiled in a battle of wills with his co-star Georgia Brown, who played Nancy. She felt Moody was trying to upstage her by getting laughs in her dramatic scenes; he felt she was trying to kill his laughs and it was a rivalry that was never truly resolved. A show that dispensed love out front, said Moody, groaned with hate backstage, although he also believed the competition between him and his co-star drove them harder.

Whatever the difficulties, the first night of Oliver! at the Wimbledon Theatre on July 1, 1960, was a triumph. There were 17 curtain calls and Moody was established as the star of the show. It was, he said, the greatest night of his life; he believed there was some kind of force in the air, a flux, a buzz, a charge.

In the years that followed, he reprised the role many times - first in the film version in 1968, which earned him a best actor Oscar nomination, and then in the Broadway revival in 1984. However, the success was double-edged for Moody, who sometimes felt that Fagin had inhibited his future career.

In 1969, a year after the Oliver film, he was offered the lead in Doctor Who when Patrick Troughton announced he was leaving. Moody was the first choice of the producer Barry Letts but, when Moody turned the part down, it went to Jon Pertwee instead. Moody later said that he had made the wrong decision.

He worked extensively in other television shows, appearing in The Avengers twice and playing the Mad Hatter in a 1960 television version of Alice in Wonderland. He also played Uriah Heep in David Copperfield in 1969 and later appeared in EastEnders, The Bill and in Casualty as a Scottish bagpiper.

In film, he had a number of memorable roles. In the 1963 comedy The Mouse on the Moon he played the Prime Minister of the fictional state of Grand Fenwick who intends to send a rocket to the moon; he also appeared with Margaret Rutherford in one of her Miss Marple films Murder Most Foul.

On stage, he played Polonius in Keith Michell's Hamlet with Elsinore updated into a fascist state, and in 2001, he played the part of comedian Eddie Waters in Trevor Griffiths Comedians for the Oxford Stage Company with Martin Freeman and David Tennant also in the cast.

He did not marry until he was 60 years old but had six children. They survive him, as does his wife Therese.

MARK SMITH