User:GRuban/Terence Frisby

Terence Frisby
Frisby, circa 1969
Born	Terence Peter Michael Frisby (1932-11-28)28 November 1932 New Cross, London, England
Died	23 April 2020(2020-04-23) (aged 87)
Education	Dartford Grammar School
Occupations	Playwright actor director producer
Years active	1964 – 2012
Children	Dominic Frisby

Terence Peter Michael Frisby (28 November 1932 – 22 April 2020) was a British playwright, actor, director and producer, best known as the author of the play There's a Girl in My Soup. He began his theater career in 1957 as a dramatic actor under the stage name Terence Holland. Within the first year, he landed his first London role in Gentlemen's Pastime at the Players' Theatre. From 1964-1968, he was one of the first presenters of the children's television series Play School, a BBC broadcast.

As a playwright, Frisby's most notable work, There's a Girl in My Soup, opened in 1966 at what is now the Gielgud Theatre), and set a record for longest running West End comedy. It also ran on Broadway, and in theaters around the world including Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Sydney, Rome, Prague and elsewhere. His script for the 1970 film version of the play won the 1970 Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Comedy Screenplay.

Early life

Frisby was born in 1932 in New Cross, south-east London, the second son of William Frisby, who worked on the railways, and Kathleen (née Casely), a former jazz drummer (unusual for the time), who was also employed in a department store.

Frisby and his older brother Jack were brought up in Welling, but during World War II were evacuated to Dobwalls in Cornwall, which period he would later memorialize in a play, musical and book. Frisby was educated at Dartford Grammar School, leaving aged 16 to become a tailor's apprentice. He remained in the occupation for six years ("six wasted years", he would later call them) before gaining a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama and training to become an actor. Judi Dench was a classmate. He paid his way by working as a factory hand, omelette chef, chauffeur, and bouncer at the Hammersmith Palais dance hall. The change that school made was dramatic, "my life changed from black and white to colour", he recalled in his autobiography. The title of his radio play, Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late, came from advice from a teacher.

Career

Actor

Frisby began his dramatic career as an actor. He acted under the name Terence Holland from 1957 to 1966. His first London role was in Gentlemen's Pastime at the Players' Theatre in 1958. He had a bit part in the film Carry On Cruising in 1962. More substantially, he was one of the first presenters on the BBC children's television series Play School from 1964-1968.

Frisby would continue to act through the 1970s even after returning to his own name and meeting success as a playwright. Frisby toured with Ken Campbell in the early 1970s, was an actor in Osborne's play A Sense of Detachment at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972, and in Barry Reckord's sexually explicit X in 1974. He guest-starred as banker Simon Winter in the last, 1976, season of The Brothers on BBC Television, played several seasons at the Young Vic, including in his own one act play, Seaside Postcard in 1978, and starred in a West End revival of Ben Travers’ Rookery Nook (play) at Her Majesty’s in 1979. He appeared as "the Manikin Man" in advertisements for Manikin Cigars in the late 1970s.

Playwright

Frisby was inspired to write plays by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956. The first play he wrote was The Subtopians, about a hero escaping into the art world from a dull London suburb. It was staged in 1962 at the Guildford Theatre, with a second run at the Bromley Repertory Theatre in 1963 (with Arthur White) and the Arts Theatre in London's West End in 1964 with Bill Fraser. It was only a moderate success, and Frisby lost his own investment, but the producer, Michael Codron, promised to produce his next stage play.

The BBC commissioned two television plays from him for their BBC Play of the Month: first Guilty, in 1963, and then Mr. Danvers' Downfall, which they rejected and never aired. They had asked for a romantic comedy, and Frisby had written one that was "anti-romantic". Instead, Frisby reworked it into a stage play that would become his most famous work.

There's a Girl in My Soup was a sex comedy about a middle-aged celebrity chef (first played by Donald Sinden) attempting to seduce a free-spirited 19-year old (Barbara Ferris). She meets the chef's repeated pickup line, "My God, but you're lovely!", with "My God, but you're corny." The play captured the spirit of the Swinging Sixties. It opened in 1966 at the Globe Theatre (now called the Gielgud Theatre) and ran for over 1,000 performances (setting the record for longest running West End comedy), before transferring to the Comedy Theatre for a further three years until 1973. It was a worldwide hit with runs on Broadway, Paris (with Gérard Depardieu playing the chef's rival), Berlin, Stockholm, Sydney, Rome (starring Domenico Modugno), Vienna, Prague and elsewhere. His script for the 1970 film, which starred Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award in 1970 for the Best British Comedy Screenplay.

Frisby earned £100,000 in the play's first year, and more as its sucess continued, but the wealth caused by the play was poisoned. Frisby and his wife fled to Cannes in the south of France, to escape taxes, then divorced, and battled for years over the money and custody of their son Dominic, much of the money going to legal fees.

The Bandwagon was a 1969 play starring Peggy Mount. It was a comedy about a south London working class family, where all the women are pregnant. It also began as a BBC commission, this time rejected because of the racy line "My friend Sylve told me it was safe standing up" which Frisby refused to cut. Frisby considered it his funniest play. It was staged at the Mermaid Theatre, and never made the West End, which caused a rift between Frisby and his regular producer, Codron.

In 1977, Frisby wrote the play It’s All Right If I Do It, which again appeared at the Mermaid Theatre, to unfavorable reviews, and again did not make the West End; he wouldn't write another play for 17 years. But in 1988 he rewrote that play as a successful television series, That's Love starring Jimmy Mulville, Diana Hardcastle, Tony Slattery, and Liza Goddard which ran on ITV from 1988-1992 and won the Gold Award for Comedy at the 1991 Houston International Film Festival.

In 1988, Frisby wrote an autobiographical radio play about being evacuated to Cornwall with his brother during World War II, Just Remember Two Things... It’s Not Fair and Don’t be Late for BBC Radio 4. This won the Giles Cooper Play of the Year Award for 1988. He rewrote it as the 2004 stage musical Kisses On a Postcard, and a 2009 book, Kisses on a Postcard: A Tale of Wartime Childhood. The title comes from a secret code the boys had agreed to send their mother, a postcard with one kiss if it was horrible, two if OK, and three if wonderful. From an urban London area, they had been evacuated to rural Cornwall, with farm animals, rivers, dams, and trains which they loved, so their postcard was covered with kisses. The play never reached the West End, but Frisby would always regard it as his best work.

Frisby also wrote many plays for television, two of which were nominated for awards. His comedy series include Lucky Feller (1975-76) with David Jason and That's Love (1988–92) with Jimmy Mulville, Diana Hardcastle, and Tony Slattery, which won the Gold Award for Comedy at the 1991 Houston International Film Festival.

Frisby finally returned to the West End with Rough Justice, a 1994 play at the Apollo Theatre starring Martin Shaw as a journalist being tried by prosecutor Diana Quick for killing his brain-damaged baby. It got unfavorable reviews , but returned at the Oxford Playhouse in 2012 starring Tom Conti.

Producer, memoirist, and comic

In the 1980s Frisby worked as a theatrical producer, for Mary O'Malley's Once a Catholic, several times, and Woza Albert! at the Criterion Theatre in London in 1984.

In 2017, at the age of 84, Frisby moved to a different stage, and performed a stand-up comedy routine in different London venues, focusing on the indignities of growing old.

His other stage plays include The Subtopians (Arts Theatre 1964), The Bandwagon (Mermaid Theatre 1969), It's All Right If I Do It (Mermaid 1977), Seaside Postcard (Young Vic 1978), Rough Justice (Apollo Theatre 1994), and Funny About Love (two UK national tours 1999–2000). All his plays are published by Samuel French. The first performance of The Subtopians was in fact at the Guildford Theatre in the week of 26 March 1962. The second production, which transferred to the Arts Theatre in the West End in 1964, was directed by himself at Bromley Repertory Theatre, where he was working as a member of the rep company.

Frisby's book, Outrageous Fortune (1998), is an autobiographical account addressed to his son, Dominic Frisby, about his fifteen years as a litigant-in-person in the High Court following his divorce in 1971 from the model Christine Doppelt and his custody claim involving their son, who is now an author and comedian. Terence Frisby's second book, Kisses on a Postcard, published by Bloomsbury.(ISBN 9781408800584). It tells of his experiences as an evacuee as a 7-year-old from London to Cornwall during World War Two. It is based on the musical of the same name.

Frisby worked for over 50 years as an actor, director and producer. He played leads and directed in the West End, at the Young Vic and elsewhere in the UK. A presentation as a producer was the South African, multi-award-winning Woza Albert! at the Criterion Theatre in 1984. It was subsequently performed off-Broadway and worldwide.

Personal life

Frisby with wife Christine, circa 1966

Frisby met model Christine Vecchione in 1963, while filming an Alka Seltzer advertisement; he was 30 years old, she was 23. They married three months later, the same year. They had an open marriage. The money from the success of There's a Girl in My Soup began coming in 1966; they bought a house in Putney, southwest London, and eventually left the country to become tax exiles in Cannes. They had one son, Dominic Frisby, born 1969. They divorced in 1971, and spent the next 15 years in legal battles over Dominic's custody and the financial proceeds from There's a Girl in My Soup. Much of those financial proceeds were spent by the legal battle: Frisby wrote that in 1970, before the divorce, they could have retired together, but in 1971 he was effectively bankrupt. Frisby wrote about the process in his 1998 autobiography Outrageous Fortune.

With grand-children, September 2019. Left to right: Samuel Frisby, Ferdie Frisby Williams, Terence Frisby, Eliza Frisby and Lola Frisby Williams

Due to the bitterness of the custody battle Frisby became a founder member of the father's rights and support group Families Need Fathers in 1974, but he later became distant from the group terming it "Nippers Need Nutters". He died on April 22, 2020, aged 87, from the side effects of treatment three years earlier for bladder cancer, which he did not have.

External links

• GRuban/Terence Frisby at IMDb

{{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Frisby, Terence}} [[Category:1932 births]] [[Category:2020 deaths]] [[Category:British writers]]