Born on 4 February 1915 in Marylebone, London, Sir Norman Wisdom OBE entered the world as the second son of chauffeur Frederick Wisdom and dressmaker Maud Wisdom. His family endured severe poverty throughout the First World War, and when his parents divorced nine years after his birth, custody went to his father. At eleven he fled a children’s home, and by thirteen he had left school to take a succession of jobs that included grocery errand boy, coal miner, waiter, pageboy and Merchant Navy cabin boy. With the outbreak of the Second World War he enlisted and was posted to India, where, like many fellow servicemen, he found he possessed a gift for amusing his comrades. He trained as a musician and served as a bandsman in the Royal Signal Corps. Once the conflict ended he launched his professional career by acting as straight man to magician David Nixon, adopting the ill-fitting, crumpled suit, angled tweed cap and loosely knotted tie that would become his lifelong trademark.
The Rank Organisation placed him under contract, and his first film, the 1953 low-budget comedy Trouble In Store, showcased his flair for slapstick and visual gags. Although the subsequent Rank pictures never won critical acclaim, they supplied much-needed escapism for British audiences during the austere postwar years by presenting a character whose misfortunes always exceeded their own. Wisdom married dancer Freda Simpson in October 1947; the couple had two children, Nicholas in 1953 and Jacqueline in 1954. During the same mid-1950s period he ventured into song, scoring two chart successes with the straight ballads “Don’t Laugh At Me (Cos I’m A Fool)” in 1954 and “Wisdom Of A Fool” in 1957. All his early films were shot in black and white, a format he defended on the grounds that his simple comic routines registered more effectively in monochrome. By the mid-1960s, however, his later colour productions had forfeited the nostalgic directness of the earlier work.
From the late 1960s onward he returned to the stage, appearing on Broadway in the musical comedy Walking Happy, yet he also revealed a dramatic range that earned him a BAFTA for portraying a cancer patient in the television play Going Gently. Frequent television appearances, including cameo roles in Last Of The Summer Wine and Coronation Street, sustained his popularity through the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000 he was knighted for services to entertainment. In later years he withdrew from show business and settled on the Isle of Man, where his health steadily deteriorated. His 1950s recordings have remained available through several reissues: Hallmark’s sixteen-track compilation Nobody’s Fool in 2002, EMI Gold’s twenty-two-track The Very Best Of in 2003 and Naxos’s Don’t Laugh At Me in 2007, each disc containing his two chart entries alongside other straight songs from his peak period.
