Peter Cook was a tall, dry, deadpan writer and improviser whose best work happened live and on television; cinema got a scattering of cameos. The one we have reviewed lasts a few minutes, and we have never forgotten it.
Fi1m perspective
A clergyman steps up to conduct a ceremony in The Princess Bride (1987) and cannot pronounce the words the ceremony needs. That is the whole joke, and Peter Cook plays it with the gravity of a man who has never been told he is funny. He does not wink, he does not pause for the laugh, and the solemnity is what makes it work. We laughed harder at those few minutes than at anything else in a film we liked a good deal, and it is because Cook trusts the audience to notice for themselves.
That trust was the habit of a lifetime. He came out of the Cambridge Footlights into Beyond the Fringe (1961), the revue he made with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and it put him at the front of the satire boom. Then came television, and the long partnership with Moore on Not Only... But Also (1965–70), where the tall, lean, unhurried Cook stood next to the small, eager Moore and let the difference do half the work. Out of it came Pete 'n' Dud, two men on a bench working through the great questions with the wrong information, and E.L. Wisty, a bore of monumental stillness.
The cinema never quite got hold of him. Bedazzled (1967), which he wrote and in which he played George Spiggot to Moore's put-upon lead, is the film that shows what the pair could do together, and there were eight films between them in all. But Cook was quickest when nobody had said cut. The stop-start of filming did not suit a man who thought fastest in front of a live audience, and his 1970s films, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) among them, are generally described as erratic, a judgement we would not argue with on the evidence of the career's shape.
After Moore left for Hollywood the work thinned to guest turns: Richard III in the first series of Blackadder (1983), the clergyman in 1987. He never had a major solo series of his own, and he admitted to laziness in a way that sounded less like confession than like a boast. The cameos are what most viewers now have of him, and they are very good cameos, which is a strange thing to say about one of the most gifted comic writers of his generation.
He once said, "I've learned from my mistakes and I'm sure I can repeat them exactly." It is the best short review of his film career we know, and he wrote it himself.
Biography
Peter Cook (1937–1995) was an English actor, satirist, writer and comedian. He was a leading figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s.
Cook studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he served as president of the Footlights dramatic club. He gained prominence as part of the revue Beyond the Fringe alongside Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and maintained a long comic partnership with Moore that included stage shows, television series and films such as Bedazzled (1967). He was proprietor of the satirical magazine Private Eye from the early 1960s until his death.
His later screen roles included Richard III in the first episode of the series Blackadder (1983) and The Impressive Clergyman in the film The Princess Bride (1987). Other credits include appearances in Supergirl (1984) and Black Beauty (1994).
