SURE, BRITISH THESPIANS CAME UP with the term corpsing, but when it comes to dying onstage, no one does it quite like British comedians.
When I die, I hope it’s like Tommy—on stage, surrounded by laughter.
—Magician Gordon Williams, before he died onstage
Tommy Cooper, six-foot-four, bulky, knob-nosed, and easily identified by the red fez that topped his lumpish head, leaves a double legacy of perhaps the best-known onstage death of a comedian as well as onstage death of a magician—though comedy took preference right up until his truncated final performance, witnessed live by millions, and viewed more than a million times on video posted on the Internet.
Born in 1921 in Glamorgan, Wales, Cooper spent his childhood practicing magic tricks, got into show business as a comic monologuist after serving in World War II, and got his break in 1947 when booked to tell jokes in a show starring the sand-dance act Marqueeze and the Dance of the Seven Veils. Cooper followed the gig with two years of touring, including a stint in pantomime, playing one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters—take note of that, as it will come into play later—and went on to three decades of success on British television with a combination of silly jokes (“Two cannibals were eating a clown. One said to the other, ‘Does he taste funny to you?’” One more? “I bought some pork chops and told the butcher to make them lean. He said, ‘Which way?’”), a catchphrase (“Just like that!”), and tricks that intentionally failed, even though he was a respected member of Britain’s elite magician’s association, the Magic Circle.
Cooper became such a part of British popular culture that he received a mention in the final verse of John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance”:
Everybody’s talking ’bout John and Yoko, Timmy Leary,
Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Hare Krishna,
Hare Hare Krishna . . .
Tommy Cooper ventured stateside for a run at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in 1954 and made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s. Though he was not a household name in the United States, Americans were familiar with his brand of shtick through the work of Carl Ballantine. Ballantine, a.k.a. the Great Ballantine, master of incompetent stage tricks and wiseacre patter, has been cited by Steve Martin as a major influence on him and magicians like David Copperfield. He’s probably familiar to the Baby Boomer generation as sailor Lester Gruber on the 1960s TV classic McHale’s Navy. Like Tommy Cooper, he’d been doing a comedy magic act since the Second World War. Ballantine, however, was the original. His act first clicked at the State-Lake Theatre in Chicago in 1942. He died in 2009, at home in Hollywood, at age ninety-two.
Tommy Cooper was sixty-three when he died in the homes of millions of Britons on the evening of Sunday, April 15, 1984. He was performing on Live from Her Majesty’s, a Sunday-night entertainment show that the British television network ITV aired live, as advertised, from Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End.
The show offered variety entertainment for the whole family, hosted by family comic Jimmy Tarbuck, a primary schoolmate of John Lennon who fronted many variety and quiz shows on the telly. Tarbuck went on to be awarded an OBE and was beloved in the UK until 2013, when, in the wake of the Operation Yewtree police investigation into sexual abuse (primarily involving children) allegations against British media personality Jimmy Savile and others, he was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a young boy in the 1970s. Police would investigate six separate claims of abuse before the charges were dismissed a year later, on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
By the time a wheezing and unsteady Tommy Cooper arrived that Sunday in 1984 at Her Majesty’s Theatre, decades of drink and cigars had most definitely caught up with him. Along with alcoholism, his maladies included lumbago, sciatica, bronchitis, circulation problems, and the lingering effects of a heart attack he’d suffered while performing in Rome in 1977. His appearances in the past two years had been rare, and the production staff had been alerted to his fragile condition. They’d even constructed a makeshift dressing room for Cooper in the wings so he wouldn’t have to climb any stairs. In any case, the show would go on.
That night, Jimmy Tarbuck was not only emcee but also a participant in part of Cooper’s act: the famous “Magic Cloak” routine. Tarbuck would hide behind the curtain, waiting to pass Cooper props that the magician would appear to pull out of his flowing gown: a paint pot, a plank of wood—props that got bigger and bigger, until finally Tarbuck would walk onto the stage carrying a stepladder, complaining he couldn’t fit it through Cooper’s legs. Only they never made it to the punchline.
Sandie Lawrence, playing the pretty blonde assistant, walked onstage to help Tommy Cooper into his magic cloak. “It was all very normal, to be honest. I was waiting there with the cloak, and Tommy was his usual self. And the audience were in raptures of laughter,” she recounted in the documentary The Untold Tommy Cooper. “I wrapped the cloak round his shoulders and I then came round the front and sort of done up the bottom, and went to move away the mic, and literally within seconds of me moving away, he fell. He sort of slumped backwards.”
Cooper fell backwards onto the floor, dropped to his haunches, and sat against the curtains, gasping for breath. “I actually thought, ‘This isn’t right,’” Lawrence said. “The audience was still laughing, but there was something not right. And I remember looking back, thinking, ‘I wonder if he’s all right,’ because, I mean he was a big chap, so you could hear him fall.”
Tarbuck waited for his cue behind the curtain. “We all thought he’d just stuck another physical gag into his set,” he told Wales on Sunday. “He was a real terror for introducing new bits and pieces without warning. But as time ticked on, we realized something terrible had happened.”
Tommy Cooper remained onstage, on camera, knees bent beneath him. He took seven or eight halting breaths before falling backwards with a snoring grunt. His fez dropped over his face. A hand poked from behind the curtain, leading to more laughter as Cooper’s body twisted under the big cape, emitting another snoring sound as his legs twitched. There was a longer, more awkward pause, enough time for the director to realize that this had not played out in dress rehearsal and that something was terribly wrong. He cued the orchestra to play into an unscheduled commercial break. Forty-nine seconds after Tommy Cooper’s collapse, viewers at home saw the screen go blank for several seconds.
That’s the story everyone knows and can watch online. The story behind the story continued during that commercial break, as Jimmy Tarbuck and the stage crew struggled to maneuver Cooper’s six feet, four inches, and 215 pounds of dead weight into the darkness behind the curtain and provide him with medical attention.
Tommy Cooper wasn’t the last act in the Live from Her Majesty’s lineup, and the show did not end on that tragic note. A troupe of dancers, Howard Keel, and Donny Osmond were all waiting to fill the rest of the hour.
“I was standing behind the curtain, waiting to go on next, when Tommy fell down,” Osmond told the Daily Mail. “The audience thought it was part of the show. So did I! Then everyone stopped laughing and he didn’t get up and the backstage people said, ‘The joke’s over, Tommy. Tommy! Tommy!’ then, ‘He’s dead! Pull the curtain over him.’ So they did. I was going to do a song. They said, ‘We’ve got a commercial, we’ll be right back.’”
With Cooper’s body splayed behind the curtain, it wasn’t possible to reset the stage for Osmond’s musical number. Tarbuck stepped away from the medical scene, grabbed Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, and informed the comedy impressionist duo that they were going on as soon as the show returned from the break. When the red light on the camera blinked on, they were to perform in front of the same curtain shielding the noisy efforts around Tommy Cooper.
Dustin Gee, the senior member of the team, said they’d need more room on the stage. “Well, you ain’t gonna get it!” Tarbuck barked. “You’re professionals. Just get on with it!”
So they did. The program returned live from the commercial break, and in the grand show-must-go-on tradition, the two unfortunate blokes in tuxedos hauled out impressions of stars of the day, from David Bowie and Mick Jagger to John Cleese as Basil Fawlty (with prosthetic forehead and fake mustache, Gee was regarded as the world’s foremost Cleese impersonator). Then they pulled on wigs and put on the voices of two old birds, Vera Duckworth and Mavis Riley from the soap opera Coronation Street; it was Dennis and Gee’s signature piece. They went through the motions, trying to get laughs while they could hear the noise of Cooper’s groaning corpse as people thumped on his chest behind the curtain a few feet upstage.
There was no mention of the tragedy until after the credits rolled and a news bulletin announced to the country that Tommy Cooper had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Witnesses who were backstage disputed that report, insisting that the big man was dead when he hit the curtains. The production company stayed silent on the matter, allegedly aiding in the cover-up because of fear that an onscreen death might put an end to live television productions. Worse, the company might be found liable for Cooper’s death (that makeshift dressing room was seen as evidence).
The death of Tommy Cooper and the events of that traumatic evening seemed to haunt Les Dennis and Dustin Gee in the years to follow. In May 1985, Gee was a hair’s breadth away from dying onstage on opening night of a summer season at the North Pier in Blackpool. He fell ill onstage but, determined not to end up like Tommy Cooper, carried on. He was taken to the hospital afterward and diagnosed with a minor heart attack. Doctors told him to take at least six months off, but he returned to complete the run barely a month later, on June 24. That was his forty-third birthday. It would be his last.
On New Year’s Day, 1986, the Vera and Mavis team was appearing as the ugly sisters in a pantomime version of Cinderella in Southport, Merseyside. (Callback! Remember, one of Tommy Cooper’s first roles was an ugly sister in the same pantomime.) After a scene in which they got laughs with tongue-in-cheek naughty humor and local references, Dennis and Gee were rushing offstage to a costume change in their dressing room when Gee suddenly clutched his left arm. “I think I am dying,” he said.
At that, he collapsed from another heart attack, this one massive. Basil Soper, the show’s company manager, managed to revive him. Gee’s production assistant Roger Edwards accompanied the comic to Southport General Hospital. Gee remained there, unconscious until 8:00 AM two days later.
Doctors feared that Dustin Gee may have sustained brain damage, but that morning he sat up, asked for a cup of tea, drank it, and then asked for ice cream. Family members who were with him said he was “quite chatty” and “lucid.” He thanked them for coming and insisted they must see him in pantomime when he recovered. He asked if anyone had seen his wristwatch. Later that morning, he fell into a deep sleep and died at 12:45 PM.
In the days to follow, many British comics blamed the pressure of the industry for the death of Dustin Gee. Surviving partner Les Dennis mentioned the Tommy Cooper incident as some kind of omen. “After the show Dustin told me, ‘That’s the way I want to go! With my boots on!’” he told the tabloid the Mirror in 2016, after the character he played on the soap opera Coronation Street died onscreen of a heart attack. “And now I think, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”
Dustin Gee’s funeral took place on January 9 at St. Oswald’s Church in Fulford, York. John Cleese sent a wreath.
Though Les Dennis’s 2008 autobiography was titled Must the Show Go On?, his partner Dustin Gee really did want to go the way Tommy Cooper went: performing, onstage, doing what he loved best. That may have been Tommy Cooper’s greatest contribution to the comedy magic community, for, in coming years, other performers would vow that when they went, they wanted to go like Tommy.
Gordon Williams of the UK comedy magic duo Ziggy Cooper suddenly sat on the stage and died in the middle of a charity show in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on April 25, 1997. His widow Pam told London’s Daily Mirror: “He had met Tommy Cooper and absolutely idolized him. He always told me he wanted to go just like him.” Williams was fifty-three.
The ghost of Tommy Cooper did more than usher fellow magicians into the afterlife. The funnyman’s spirit also intervened with one performer who died onstage—and helped bring him back to life! The incident took place at the Manchester Arena on January 31, 2015, opening night of the Phoenix Nights Live tour. The show featured stars of Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights, a British sitcom about a working men’s club in Greater Manchester.
The second half of the show had just gotten under way when actor Ted Robbins, who played series villain Den Perry, made a surprise appearance. It truly was a surprise for the audience because earlier in the show, Peter Kay, in his role as wheelchair-bound Phoenix Club owner Brian Potter, told the crowd that the Perry character was serving time in Strangeways prison after setting fire to the club. So people were chuffed when Robbins emerged from beneath the stage floor, as if he’d tunneled out of prison, and performed a tongue-in-cheek rendition of the Prodigy’s “Firestarter.”
Robbins, fifty-nine years old, overweight, and sweaty, was perfect for the role. He was also a walking heart attack waiting to happen, and the heart attack did indeed happen a few moments later, when, in the middle of his routine, he suddenly clutched his chest and fell backwards onto the stage, flat on his back.
The audience, of course, wasn’t sure what to make of the display. Many thought it was part of the act. Jeers—aimed at the character, not the performer—echoed through the venue. Lucky for Ted, as soon as he fell, his costars and family thought of one thing: Tommy Cooper.
“We were watching him on the screen [backstage] and I noticed his hand shaking and I just thought he was nervous but he just collapsed,” costar Paddy McGuinness told Jonathan Ross on his ITV chat show. “It happened to Tommy Cooper, but when you see it, it is horrendous.”
Robbins’s wife, Judy, was in the audience with their daughter and his sisters. “He just fell backwards. I knew straight away that something wasn’t right,” she was quoted as saying in the Mirror. “People were laughing as they thought it was part of the act. I heard someone say: ‘Oh, he’s doing a Tommy Cooper impression,’ because Tommy Cooper died on stage. But I just knew it wasn’t right. Unbeknown to me, a paramedic was sat behind me who knew by the way Ted fell that it wasn’t a joke. Thank God we were near the stage because we just flew straight up there and the paramedic started working on Ted straight away.”
They dropped the curtain quickly and went to work on saving Robbins’s life. “Talk about luck,” said McGuinness. “Richard Curtis was in the audience that night and the guy next to him happened to be a heart specialist and he turned round to Richard and asked if he could go on stage.”
The heart specialist joined the paramedic and the pair performed CPR in tandem on the stage. Fifteen thousand spectators could only watch and shout encouragement. “It was the most bizarre, surreal experience,” Judy Robbins recalled. “I was watching Ted fight for his life in front of fifteen thousand people.”
The paramedic continued to pound hard on Robbins’s chest. He pounded so hard he cracked twelve of Robbins’s ribs and his sternum. Medics who worked for the arena brought out a defibrillator. Fifteen minutes had passed without a response. “He actually died, his heart stopped on stage,” said McGuinness.
Ted Robbins was most definitely dead. Then, the defibrillator charged, the paramedic placed the paddles on Robbins’s heart, and—ZAP! Ted Robbins was jolted back to life! He was drenched in blood, because he’d bitten his tongue when he collapsed, but he had a heartbeat. He was stuffed into an ambulance and taken to Wythenshawe Hospital.
Costar Justin Moorhouse addressed the crowd. “We are very sorry,” he said. “This is not part of the show. I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone the show tonight, as obviously we have more important things to do.”
Ted Robbins died onstage, and lived to tell the tale. A month later, with a new lease on life and on the way to a fifty-pound (3.57-stone) weight loss, he told the BBC, “I was looking forward to the show, although bizarrely I had a sense of foreboding on the day. I remember coming up the ladder on stage and the crowd booing Den Perry. I did a couple of gags and then I remember feeling kind of peaceful and calm, thinking ‘let’s have a little sit down for a minute.’ I did my Tommy Cooper impression—God rest him.”
At least one comedian was not impressed at all with the way Tommy Cooper made his exit. Eric Morecambe of the long-running British comedy team Morecambe and Wise was a contemporary of Cooper’s and said publicly that he’d hate to go in that manner.
Exactly six weeks after Cooper’s death, Morecambe flew solo, without partner Ernie Wise, in a charity show at the Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. Morecambe’s wife Joan was in the audience and recalled he was “on top form.” At the close of the show, Morecambe ran onstage six times to clown with jazz musician and multi-instrumentalist Alan Randall. Finally, Morecambe announced, “That’s your lot!” and left the stage. He joked, “Thank goodness that’s over!” He then took a half-dozen steps and collapsed from a heart attack—his third. Morecambe died at Cheltenham General Hospital just before 4:00 AM on May 28, 1984. He was fifty-eight. If it’s any consolation, he did at least make it into the wings.
Kenneth Horne, the last of Britain’s great radio comedians, was in noticeably shaky health on February 14, 1969, when he entered the grand ballroom of London’s Dorchester Hotel. The star of three of the most popular radio shows in UK history had already suffered a stroke in 1958 and a heart attack in 1966. He’d been prescribed an anticoagulant to ward off future coronary unpleasantness, but on the advice of his new medical adviser, he had stopped taking his medicine. His new medical adviser was a faith healer.
Horne had arrived at the Dorchester to host the annual Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards dinner, a ceremony that was being filmed for broadcast on BBC1 later in the evening. Horne was a solid choice for the role. He’d been a fixture in British comedy since 1944, and his latest radio show, Round the Horne, was about to kick off its fifth series (or “season” to the Yanks).
As the show got under way, none of the 740 telly bigwigs or their dates had any idea that the sixty-one-year-old, bushy-browed, baldheaded comic was in anything but tip-top condition. Horne kept them laughing as he announced the award winners. At his side handing out the trophies was Earl Mountbatten of Burma, uncle to Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II’s second cousin once removed (while you attempt to figure out that incestuous math, keep in mind that ten years later, the Earl would be blown up on his boat by an IRA bomb).
It was midway through the ceremony when Horne announced the award for best comedy script of 1968. The winners were Barry Took and Marty Feldman for their television series Marty. Horne was especially tickled to see Took and his hyperthyroid partner take the prize. They were the team that created Round the Horne.
The writers headed back to their table and Horne leaned into the mic: “These chaps got an award last year for Round the Horne, which is coming back on Sunday, March 16, with a repeat the following day. So don’t forget to listen!” The audience got a good laugh at the plug. Horne had moved on to announcing the award for Best Scientific Program when he began to sway. Then he stumbled. Then he fell, three feet off the podium, and crashed onto the ballroom floor.
Several women in the audience fainted. Someone yelled for a doctor, and BBC chairman Lord Hill scrambled from his table to give aid. Hill seemed the right man for the job: he was an MD, who during World War II was popular for his broadcasts as the Radio Doctor, discussing health problems in the language of the simple folk. Could he save Kenneth Horne, though?
Barry Took and Marty Feldman set down their awards and helped carry Horne’s body into the nearest room, which happened to be the bar. They laid him on the carpeted barroom floor and Lord Hill tried artificial respiration. Another doctor who was in the house attempted mouth-to-mouth with the star. Kenneth Horne did not respond to the kiss of life.
The ambulance arrived, and Horne was carted off to St. George’s Hospital, just a short ride down Park Lane. He was quite obviously cold and dead long before they wheeled him into the emergency room.
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking until airtime and there was an awards show to complete. Guild chairman Peter Morley (a documentarian and director acclaimed for his coverage of Winston Churchill’s funeral and for conducting the only interview with Adolf Hitler’s younger sister Paula) stepped to the podium and assured everyone that Kenneth Horne would have wanted them to carry on. Lord Mountbatten took over hosting, minus the comic asides, and presented the remainder of the awards. The award for TV Light Entertainment Personality of the Year went to Marty Feldman. His bulging eyes welled with tears.
After the ceremony, there was dancing—it was a ballroom, after all. Peter Morley stepped in once again to stop the music and spoil the party to announce that Kenneth Horne had passed away. In tribute to Kenneth Horne, the dancing stopped for five minutes. Then the party continued.
The awards ceremony did air as scheduled, at 11:15 PM on BBC1, though Kenneth Horne’s collapse and tumble were edited out of the program. At the point of disruption, the film jumped to a shot of Mountbatten in Horne’s position. An announcer intoned, “Mr. Horne was taken ill at this point and has since died.”
Death was attributed to a massive heart attack. According to Horne’s biographer, Barry Johnston, his doctor blamed the faith healer, saying, “Poor silly fellow! If only he’d listened to me, he could have had another ten years!”
On the brighter side, Horne’s writer Barry Took said, “He went the way he would have liked to, on top of a big laugh.”
Comic actor Sid James was one of Britain’s biggest comedy stars of the 1950s and ’60s. Everyone knew him for his big laugh, or more accurately, his “dirty laugh.” The Daily Express newspaper described the chortle as “the most distinctive laugh in the history of British comedy,” an “unforgettable gravelly cackle [that] embodied all the warmth, lechery and cheekiness which made Sid James so cherished by the British public.” The craggy-faced star of nineteen films in the very bawdy, very naughty, very British Carry On series was born Solomon Joel Cohen in South Africa and had been a fixture in British films, on television, and on stages since 1947.
In the spring of 1976, Sid James was sixty-two and starring as Sid Abbott, husband, father, and traveling stationery salesman in the popular television sitcom Bless This House. To coincide with and cash in on the start of the show’s fifth series, he set off on a theater tour of a play called The Mating Season. The play was a smutty, leering farce by Irish playwright (and Carry On screenwriter) Sam Cree, really not much more or less than a stage version of a Carry On, with its seaside postcard humor and a chance for audiences to see old Sid James laugh his familiar “Yak! Yak!” in the crumpled flesh.
James had toured Australia with the play to some success. This time around, the theaters were a bit threadbare, the audiences didn’t pay more than a couple of pounds for the best seats, and Sid wasn’t in the best of health.
The curtains opened on the tour on March 8 at the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton, and the show carried on its theatrical death march through grand old theaters in need of refurbishment. It was eight shows a week as the company moved around England, to Wimbledon, Birmingham, Richmond, and, on Monday, April 26, the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. It was all a bit depressing. The theater that could hold twenty-two hundred people boasted four hundred patrons on opening night.
The play had proceeded fifteen minutes into the first act. The audience cheered and hollered at the sight of Sid James when he entered the living room stage set. The laughs kept coming as comic actress Audrey Jeans held an aerosol spray and, referring to another woman’s perfume, said, “I can’t bear the smell of cats!” She sprayed the bottle under Sid’s nose. He gasped for breath and fell backwards onto a sofa. The audience laughed. Even the cast thought he was doing it all for show.
Actress Olga Lowe entered the scene. She was another Carry On veteran and James’s childhood friend, who’d helped him get his start in pictures when he first arrived in England. “I came on, said my first lines and he answered as normal,” she was quoted as saying in the Sunderland Echo. “Then I sat on the sofa with him. I said my next line and he didn’t answer. His head had slumped and his eyes had gone back into his head. I thought it was a gag. Well, you would with Sid. He was such a rascal.”
When James didn’t respond to her ad-libs, Olga Lowe realized something was very wrong with the star and called to the crew to bring down the curtain. The audience laughed when the technical director stepped out in front of the curtain to ask, “Is there a doctor in the house?” The doctor who stepped forward laughed as well.
Stagehands ran over to James, whose head was now lolled back as he gasped for breath. Tour manager David Jackley attempted the kiss of life. The doctor saw that it was no laughing matter and helped as James was carried offstage and rushed by ambulance to the Royal Infirmary. Sid James, who’d suffered a heart attack in 1967, was stricken with a fatal one this time around. He was dead before the ambulance completed its journey.
All four hundred members of the audience got their money refunded. The remainder of the run in Sunderland and the rest of the Mating Season tour was canceled. How could it not be? Sid James was its raison d’être.
As word of his death spread, the tributes poured in. Sid’s third wife and widow, Valerie, looked for a silver lining. “Sid died making people laugh,” she announced. “I suppose, for him, it was the perfect way to go.”
Not so fast. Barbara Windsor, Sid James’s costar in all those Carry On movies—and a woman with whom he’d carried on a well-publicized ten-year affair while he was married to Valerie—told the Sunderland Echo that Sid would roll over in his grave if he realized he died touring run-down theaters in the provinces. “It was everything Sid hated,” she insisted. “He liked his films and his television. The only time he did theatre was if he could have some lovely location.
“Everyone said to him: Don’t go up to Sunderland. He looked so ill, so unhappy. He went up to Sunderland and the rest is history.”
“Don’t go up to Sunderland.” Sunderland in northeast England had a reputation as a “graveyard” for comedians, where many died a death onstage. In fact, when the theater manager called the show’s producer, Bill Roberton, to tell him that Sid James had died in Sunderland, the producer replied, “Don’t worry, everybody dies in Sunderland.”
Sid James’s unhappiness may be eternal. More than one person, including comedian Les Dawson, has claimed to have seen his ghost haunting the Sunderland Empire Theatre.