Dudley Moore

The Musician Who Didn't Want to Be Just a Joke

Dudley Moore stood just over five feet tall and was born with a clubfoot. He didn't look like the typical Hollywood leading man, but the guy played the piano like an angel and had a sense of comic timing that few could match in the sixties. Before becoming a movie star, he was a child prodigy in a working-class neighborhood of London who found refuge from bullying in music.

He was a virtuoso trapped in a body he himself despised.

At Oxford University, his talent for jazz opened doors that his social background would otherwise have closed. There he met Peter Cook, and together they shook up British comedy with the stage show Beyond the Fringe. The duo worked on pure contrast: Cook was the cynical intellect, while Moore brought musical warmth and the face of a nice guy. But the partnership ended as a battlefield of egos and alcohol that pushed Moore to cross the Atlantic.

The Decade of Unlikely Success

Luck changed when Blake Edwards desperately searched for a replacement for George Segal in the film 10. Moore accepted the role of a composer in the throes of a midlife crisis who becomes obsessed with a young woman on the beaches of Mexico. The release in 1979 was an unexpected hit that turned him into a sex symbol for mainstream audiences.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1981, he landed the role that would define his career forever in Arthur the King. Moore played a charming, alcoholic millionaire who had to choose between a massive inheritance and the love of a waitress. The film grossed more than $95 million in the U.S. market alone and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

But massive success in Hollywood came with a repetition trap that Moore didn't always know how to handle.

The Silence of the Keys and Oblivion

The second half of the 1980s was a wasteland of poor creative choices and mediocre projects. He tried to repeat the formula for success with Arthur 2: On the Rocks in 1988, but critics and audiences unanimously turned their backs on him. Producers began to see him as an actor typecast in a character that no longer connected with the new decade.

By the mid-nineties, people close to him began to notice strange behavior during filming and live performances. Moore would forget his lines, and his fingers no longer moved with the same precision across the piano keys. Many media outlets of the time speculated that his on-screen alcoholism had carried over into his real life.

The truth was much crueler.

In 1999, he publicly announced that he had progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease with no cure. The man who had made millions of people laugh lost the ability to speak and to play the piano before turning sixty-five.

Moore died on March 27, 2002 in New Jersey from complications of pneumonia. He rests in Watchung Cemetery following a private ceremony that avoided any kind of media spectacle.