Dead at 99, Stanley Baxter – essentially the most admired, sensible (and tortured) comic on TV who spent his final 25 years as a digital recluse

An hour with Stanley Baxter was like a night at a party with a crowd of the most celebrated actors and aristocrats of the telly age.

As he reeled off streams of outrageous, delicious anecdotes, he didn’t simply imitate people – he embodied them. The Queen, or Kenneth Williams, would simply materialise in front of your eyes as you wiped away tears of laughter. It was almost literally magical.

But in one instant, like a change in the wind, he could become broken down with sadness. Melancholy swept over him. Once, in the middle of a story while I was interviewing him, he stopped and said in the gentlest voice: ‘I’m just grateful my wife and I couldn’t have children. Her schizophrenia and my nerves – what an awful combination.’

Stanley Baxter, who has died aged 99, was once the most admired comedian on television. His annual variety shows, in which he played dozens of characters, were the small screen’s most expensive extravaganzas.

But he spent the past 25 years as a virtual recluse in his first floor apartment in a Highgate Village art deco mansion. He dreaded going out – believing himself to be decrepit, he feared being recognised and, worse, pitied.

Even the telephone filled him with horror. One afternoon, I saw him flinch when it rang. ‘What fresh hell is this?’ he muttered.

His greatest terror was that the public would discover what everyone already knew, the biggest open secret in showbusiness – that Stanley Baxter was gay.

The first time we met, he opened the door to me and, retreating three steps up the stairs to gain the advantage of height, roared: ‘Let me tell you this, you are not going to write about my f*****g sex life!’

What’s so heartbreaking is that he hid his sexuality all his life, preferring to turn his back on fame rather than risk humiliation. The brutal truth is that, when he did come out as gay in a biography in 2020, the only people shocked were the ones who assumed he had been dead for years.

‘There are many gay people these days who are fairly comfortable with their sexuality,’ he said. ‘I’m not. I never wanted to be gay. I still don’t. Anyone would be insane to choose to live such a very difficult life. The truth is, I don’t really want to be me.’

It was an unworthy fate for a man who should have been revered as the greatest jewel in Britain’s comedy crown. His breadth of talent was unmatched – satirist, stand-up comedian, singer, dancer, impressionist, wit, poet, panto dame, dramatic actor, writer and choreographer.

Bax couldn’t just do it all: he did all of it better than anyone else.

His starriest turn was as the Duchess of Brendah, in tiara and silk gloves up to his armpits… so much like the Queen that he could have taken her place for Trooping the Colour.

He was the first comedian to impersonate Her Majesty on TV. To add to the insolence of it, one Christmas show included a mock message from Buckingham Palace in which he described the Queen Mum as a ‘priceless antique’.

In lavishly produced sketch shows throughout the 1970s, Baxter sent up everyone from Hollywood superstars to pompous BBC pundits. He staged magnificent song-and-dance numbers that took months to film as he played every part – spoofing movie musicals, Oscar-winning blockbusters and TV rivals.

Donning outrageous drag costumes, Baxter announced himself as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis or Mae West. Often he gave their names mischievous twists – becoming Glandy (Glenda) Jackson, John Bitumen (Betjeman), Malcolm Gibberidge (Muggeridge) or Alan Wicked (Whicker).

But the splendour of the shows made them impossible to sustain. Baxter switched from the BBC to ITV and back again, eventually concentrating on just one mega-show a year, until even that became so costly it was impractical.

His epics became a byword for TV that was too ambitious for the confines of the small screen.  

At the same time, his private life was so tortuous and painful that his nerves unravelled. Returning to the stage, he was tormented by a morbid fantasy of suffering a heart attack in his dressing room before the curtain went up and being discovered on the floor by a stage hand: ‘You’re awful cold, Mr Baxter…’

Miserable and afraid, he decided to retire – and for his last 30 years cut himself off from the one thing that had sustained him throughout his life, the adulation of audiences.

Stanley Baxter was born in Glasgow in May 1926, the son of a timid insurance clerk called Fred and his wife Bessie – a blacksmith’s daughter with dreams of stardom for their only son from the time he could walk.

Bessie and her sisters loved amateur dramatics. They staged their own vaudeville shows, performing hits of the day such as Baby Face and Bye Bye Blackbird, and smoking Russian cigarettes to cultivate an image as artsy Bohemians.

By the time he was four, Stanley was a regular with his mother at the music halls, and at six he was starring on the city’s talent circuit. Dressed in a sailor suit with his hair tonged into waves, he sang saucy music hall numbers… such as I’m One Of The Lads Of Valencia: ‘You can’t beat a Spaniard for kissing, Oh ladies, just think what you’re missing!’

His mother called him Sonny Boy and dinned a fear of failure into his head: ‘She probably felt if she praised me I’d try less hard. I began to be scared someone else would do better than me on stage, and my mother would clatter me.’

In lavishly produced sketch shows throughout the 1970s, Baxter sent up everyone from Hollywood superstars to pompous BBC pundits 

Fiercely jealous, Bessie refused to allow her son to have female friends. She needn’t have worried – from the first time he saw a half-naked Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan at a Saturday cinema matinee, Stanley knew he was attracted to men.

Aged 18 in 1944, he received his call-up papers, but was deemed too short-sighted for active Army service. After months working in the coal pits as a Bevin Boy, he was grateful in June 1945 to be assigned to the Seaforth Highlanders and sent to India and then, as the war with Japan ended, to Burma.

A notice caught his eye, appealing for performers to join the Combined Service Entertainment [CSE] unit. A seaplane took him to his audition in Singapore, where he was sent to the stage door of the Victoria Theatre.

A crowd of CSE artistes was just leaving. Baxter asked if he could cadge a lift and was told there was no room in the truck, because some of the men had invited local women back with them.

A nasal voice cut through the throng: ‘Of course we can take him! Yesss! There’s room! We don’t want all you and your f*****g girlfriends!’

That was Baxter’s first meeting with Kenneth Williams. The pair formed a lifelong friendship, sharing a dormitory and a love of poetry, and spending their wages every Saturday night on fine dining and gin-and-tonics.

Soon they were topping the bill in a show called At Your Service, dancing onstage in yellow and blue uniforms, one hand on the hip and the other pointing to the lairy squaddies in the front row, defying a barrage of catcalls.

Yet Baxter was appalled by the open homosexuality in CSE – ‘all chiffon hankies and make-up and flouncing about,’ he said. ‘I thought, I really hate this. I don’t want to be involved in this kind of world.’

When he returned to Glasgow two years later, he joined the idealistic Citizen’s Theatre Company, performing Ibsen and Shaw to working class audiences in the Gorbals district.

Determined to be heterosexual, he started courting an actress named Moira Robertson. She was 22 and highly strung, and he was taken aback by how heavily she fell for him.

When he warned her that all of his previous sexual experiences had been with men, she climbed out of their second storey window and stood on the ledge, threatening to jump. ‘If I can’t have you,’ she yelled, ‘I won’t settle for anyone else.’

Guilt-stricken and confused, Baxter relented. They were married in 1952. On their wedding night, he sat on the bed and sobbed.

The couple moved to London, and by the end of the decade he was starring in a BBC sketch show called On The Bright Side, with Ronnie Barker and Una Stubbs. Dashing and square-jawed, he was the leading man in light film comedies too, such as The Fast Lady.

But his life imploded when he was arrested in a public toilet in Holloway in 1962 and charged with soliciting for sex. At this time, sex between consenting adult males was still illegal. ‘I was going to top myself,’ he said. ‘I thought, my career will never survive this – and if I don’t have a career, what do I have?’

He was saved by the celebrity barrister David Jacobs, who argued in court that Baxter could not have been ‘soliciting’ – because, when he was arrested, there was no one in the gents’ apart from two policemen.

Psychiatric therapy for his sexual desires failed to help. The doctor, realising he was married, simply told him to return to his wife.

Instead, unable to cope with Moira’s pleas for a baby, he left her. They met for lunch every day in the 1970s, and she talked frequently of killing herself – but he was unprepared when a friend called at their old home to find the front door wide open and Moira in the bath, the water dark with blood.

She lived, but her mental health was tragically fragile for the rest of her life. ‘She told me she was hearing voices,’ Baxter said in despair. ‘She thought the television was talking to her.’

Though they never lived together again, he did his best to support her, emotionally as well as financially – wracked with guilt that he could not be the husband she needed.

In 1997, when he told her he was going on holiday for a few weeks, a row erupted. ‘She punched me,’ he said. ‘My glasses flew off. It was the one and only time she had ever reacted this way.’

On his return to Britain, he called her from the airport. She didn’t answer. He went straight to the house. When he discovered the door was unlocked again, he knew what he would find. Moira was in the bedroom, dead from an overdose. She was 69.

Baxter never recovered fully from the shock. He talked about her often, always with a note of self-loathing, and rejected all reassurance that it was not his fault.

Though he made a few tentative trial comebacks over the next 20 years – a radio show here, a TV interview there – he lacked the confidence to revive his career, or even to accept the homage of generations of comedians who regarded him as a master.

His loneliness was made worse by his dread of the phone and a tendency to suspend friendships on the slightest pretext.

‘It’s purdah for him,’ he’d say. ‘The cold shoulder.’ He ceased speaking to Kenneth Williams on several occasions, though that always thawed.

Others were banished permanently and I was one of them. For years he’d leave me phone messages, and I’d send him a bottle of gin and a packet of Bensons on his birthday – two cigarettes a night were his last vice.

One year, the booze and the cigs were returned. I’d offended him, perhaps by a comment in my TV column about some actor he knew. He wouldn’t say why.

That was Stanley Baxter. The world offered him open arms, and he gave it the cold shoulder.