Cyril Louis Goldbert
,
Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
Birthday
1933-08-23
Occupation
Actor
Spouse(s)
Dorinda Stevens (? - ?) (divorced)
Years Active
1953–1994
Biography
Peter Paul Wyngarde (born 23 August 1928) is a French-born English actor best known for playing the character Jason King, a bestselling novelist turned sleuth, in two British television series: Department S (1969–70) and Jason King (1971–72). Wyngarde was born in Marseille, France, the son of an English father and a French mother. A number of published references state that Wyngarde's real name is Cyril Louis (or Lovis) Goldbert. The now-defunct Hellfire Club official website described this as a myth that developed from his jokingly giving his uncle's name, Louis Jouvet, in an interview in the 1970s. However, J.G. Ballard and his family knew him as Cyril Goldbert when they were interned in Lunghua civilian internment camp during World War II. His father worked for the British Diplomatic Service, and as a result his childhood was spent in a number of different countries. In 1941, while his parents were away in India, he went to stay with a Swiss family in Shanghai. The Japanese Army took over Shanghai's International Settlement on 8 December 1941, and as a British citizen Goldbert was interned in the Lunghua civilian internment camp on 10 April 1943. Conditions in the camp were sometimes harsh. According to J. G. Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life, "Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde" was a fellow internee at Lunghua Camp and "He was four years older than me...". Ballard was born in November 1930 but according to Lunghwa Camp records compiled in 1943, Goldbert was actually born in 1928. His younger siblings, Adolphe Henry and Marion Simeone, were under Swiss protection and thus exempt from internment. As a young man he became an actor and from the mid-1950s had roles in feature films, television plays and television series guest appearances. One of these, a television adaptation of Julien Green's novel South (1959, originally Sud), in which Wyngarde featured in a lead role, is thought to be the earliest television play with an overtly homosexual theme. He appeared as Pausanias opposite Richard Burton in the film Alexander the Great (1956), played a lead role in the film The Siege of Sidney Street (1960), and appeared as Sir Roger Casement in an episode in the Granada TV's On Trial series produced by Peter Wildeblood. Wyngarde's other film work was limited but had impact. In Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), he had brief (unspeaking) scenes as the leering Peter Quint with Deborah Kerr and Pamela Franklin. The following year he was the lead actor in the occult thriller Night of the Eagle.
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