Kenneth Williams
Britain’s favourite comic voice of the “Carry On” films kept his homosexuality a private torment, recorded only in his diaries.
Kenneth Williams grew up in a working-class family in central London; his father, a barber, despised his son’s effeminacy. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Engineers in Asia, where he discovered entertaining in army shows.
He became famous on radio in “Hancock’s Half Hour” and “Round the Horne”, where he and Hugh Paddick played a camp couple who spoke in Polari, the secret slang of gay men. From 1958 he appeared in 26 of the “Carry On” films, and for twenty years he was a regular on the radio panel show “Just a Minute”. With his nasal voice and outrageous faces he was one of Britain’s best-loved comedians.
In private Williams was lonely and often depressed. He lived alone, near his mother, and his diaries, published after his death, show a man who desired men but – partly because sex between men was illegal for much of his life and partly because of his own inhibitions – hardly ever acted on it.
He died at his London flat in 1988, aged 62. The inquest could not determine whether his death was intentional.