By, Michael Freedland
5 min read
ByMichael Freedland, Michael Freedland
There have always been showbusiness "greats" who effectively made love to their audiences - men and women who, to use an overworked phrase, earn millions and then forget who got them to the top. Ron Moody was different. He remembered - and the people who paid to see his work remembered, too. That was their way of making love to him.
No pop star, he. Ron was not by any stretch of the imagination a Beatle. Nor like any of today's performers who have only to grab a microphone to have kids scream with an orgasmic passion. What Moody achieved was something entirely different.
On stage and film, he was recognised as being unique. A busy man ‑- most people had no idea how busy he really was - it was in just one role that he was special. But it was all he needed. Just one part which created that love affair. Men and women who were teenagers or in their early 20s half-a-century ago, still sit back and smile when they remember the Moody Fagin in Lionel Bart's musical, Oliver. It was one of Moody's greatest achievements.
I one asked Topol how he felt at the notion of being typecast as the Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof. His answer was simple: "I say 'Thank God'". In a way, Ron Moody was the British Topol.
He probably thanked God for being known as everyone's favourite Fagin every time he went to shul - which he did more frequently than most Jewish stars. He had reason to do so, not just for the original production and the film, but for the countless stage revivals.
Whatever else he did, like play Captain Hook in five years of Peter Pan (I was in the audience at one Pan performance and he did a whole thing about me and my radio show, which must have mystified the audience), none was like the Oliver role. It didn't need to be.
He wrote entertaining novels and a musical based on the life of the clown Grimaldi in which he starred. He starred and often didn't star in films and in shows that didn't quite make it. But Fagin was all his. No matter who has played the part in the years since Moody finally took off his beard and big floppy, worn, black hat, no one else has been able to match him. Even in old age there was the hope that someone somewhere would invite him to take up the greasepaint again and start picking a pocket or two. Again that was part of the love affair.
Some of the other Fagins gave great performances. Ron Moody gave from his heart. Or, as his rabbi might have put it, from his neshamah, his soul. And it took a fair bit of soul searching when Lionel Bart, brought up in an East End community not a million miles from Ron's birthplace in Tottenham, invited him to create the role.
Ron wasn't sure. He knew his Dickens and he had doubts about the novelist's thinking behind the character of the miser Fagin. He also knew that the image in most people's minds was that of Alec Guinness's interpretation in the 1948 film of Oliver Twist. Guinness later denied it, but the interpretation was an antisemitic caricature. Should a nice Jewish boy born Ronald Moodnik allow himself to play the same part?
"I thought I could make him very much more sympathetic," he once told me. "Lionel didn't like my ideas, but I thought that was the only way to make it work."
There was always a sense of insecurity - Jewish insecurity - about him. He still wasn't sure when the show hit the stage at the New Theatre in London in June 1960. Night after night, he made changes - again to Bart's dismay.
The people out front didn't notice there had been anything wrong in the first place. Even the critics thought he was wonderful. But as he later said, "It wasn't until my mother read the Jewish Chronicle that I thought it was all right. If the Jewish Chronicle liked it, I should be happy."
Romulus Films were happy enough to take Ron along with the rest of Oliver for the film. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role. He once told me: "It was wonderful. They sent a beautiful limousine to pick me up at the hotel and take me to the ceremony. Afterwards, when I hadn't won, I had to look for a taxi to take me to the party."
It wasn't difficult to realise that he was trying to give Fagin, and with it too many people's ideas of a Jew, the good name that he cherished. He was at one time working on a similar treatment for Shylock.
Sadly, it never happened. But I can't help thinking of how "A Little Pound of Flesh" could have been a good title for a song. Perhaps not. I have every reason to be one of those who smile at Ron's name. I'd known him for a long time. In fact, I have something of a proprietorial interest in him. Back in the 1950s, as a very junior reporter, I covered a school variety show, the sort of thing all junior reporters do and dread.
This one was different. One of the teachers brought in a fellow former student at LSE to do what was not yet known as a "shtick" - Yiddish hadn't yet entered the Lutonian vocabulary. I will never forget how I picked out one of the cast for particular praise and said we would be hearing more of… Ron Moody.
In the days when I ran You Don't Have To Be Jewish on radio, we became good friends. We used to meet for an occasional lunch or dinner - once in Hollywood, where he was staying at the iconic Chateau Marmont and I at somewhere somewhat less historic.
We both scanned the menu looking for something that would be reasonably kosher and talked about showbiz, Judaism, our families. At least I talked about my family. Ron wanted to talk about the family he didn't yet have. His mother was at the top of his list, but he, close to his 60th, hadn't yet married. His bride would have to be one who kept a kosher home, who lit candles on Friday night and who wanted their children to go to cheder. I remember the details.
A short while later, he married Therese who, in a very short time gave him six children. A few years later, he accepted an invitation from me to take part in a live programme for Succot - in the succah of the South Hampstead Synagogue. He confessed that one of the reasons he agreed to do the programme was so that he could talk to a rabbi. His son was about to have his brit and he was worried.
He continued to work, most recently in a rather terrible TV insurance commercial in which he played a manservant. Bad casting. Ron was never anyone's servant. Except that of an audience, of course. I last saw him at the New London Synagogue on a Shabbat morning. He sat at the back and looked a little lost. Then someone recognised him and smiled. More came up and smiled, too. The love was still there. And so was his own ambition to keep going. You could say he was always reviewing the situation.
