Remembered Laughter: The Life of Kenneth Williams

 

Coming Soon:

REMEMBERED LAUGHTER: THE LIFE OF KENNETH WILLIAMS

Kenneth Williams was a national institution - film star, radio and television personality, camp icon. When a small fraction of his diaries were published in 1993, the heavy censoring of the journals made many wonder whether we had been given the full story of Britain's most complicated and beguiling funny man.

Now the secrets of Kenneth Williams' extraordinary life are revealed for the first time. After decades of silence, Williams' most intimate friends - the inner circle who were by his side for more than forty years - have finally agreed to speak about him publicly. Their astonishing revelations offer a startling new insight into the true story of his life and career. Remembered Laughter traces Williams' lonely beginnings as the son of a bare-knuckle boxer, who cruelly rejected him, to his early promise as a straight actor, lauded by Kenneth Tynan, mentored by Orson Welles and Richard Burton. The book explains why he ultimately abandoned the Old Vic and the classical stage in favour of the Carry On films, Hancock's Half Hour and Round the Horne, and how he emerged as Britain's leading post-war comedian.

But Remembered Laughter also goes into the darker terrain of Williams' obscure personal life. Using previously unpublished extracts from his journals and letters, and the deeply personal portraits of him by his friends and colleagues in showbusiness - Stanley Baxter, Joss Ackland, Sarah Miles, Sheila Hancock, Timothy West - the book tells the full story of a man who could never find the courage to commit himself emotionally to another person, and who employed increasingly bizarre therapies to assuage his loneliness and frustration.