Dudley Moore : An Intimate Portrait

Rena Fruchter was Dudley's concert piano partner, and the friend who looked after him in the final years of his life, until his death at the age of 66. This is her intimate portrait of the extraordinarily brilliant, complex character that was Dudley Moore. During the last ten years of his life Dudley changed. He stepped off the podium and into real life. Physically life was difficult, professionally it was turbulent, but during his final years he blossomed and in the midst of his illness from the debilitating effects of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, he found peace. Rena writes beautifully of Dudley's final years but also take us back through his life story - conveying his inimitable talent, humour and vibrancy, and evoking the atmosphere of a working class upbringing in Forties Britain, life in Fifties London and his relationship with Peter Cook and the excesses of Eighties LA. With style and precision she unravels his personality, looks back at his childhood and career, weaving a moving and compelling story of a unique man.

The public persona of Dudley Moore was many-sided: the short, anxious member of the comic duo Pete and Dud; the hard-drinking millionaire in the phenomenally successful Arthur; the gifted concert pianist and composer; the working-class kid who won a scholarship to Oxford. Dudley Moore was born with a club foot to an East London railwayman and his perfectionist wife. He went on to become an accomplished jazz pianist at Magdalen College, but left for a career in comedy, and later, film stardom. His life spanned an era of brilliant British comedy and an extraordinary decade of success—and excess—in Hollywood. After a debilitating illness forced him off the stage into real life, he struggled to survive; paradoxically, he also found inner peace. Looking back on the final 15 years of his life, Rena Fruchter gives us a loving and unflinching portrait of her friend Dudley Moore.