Dudley Moore est un acteur, compositeur et scénariste britannique, né le 19 avril 1935 à Londres et mort le 27 mars 2002 dans le New Jersey (États-Unis).

La carrière de Dudley Moore démarra dans les années 1960, dans un spectacle humoristique très populaire, Beyond the fringe. Avec son compère Peter Cook, il forma un duo inoubliable à la BBC, puis devint rapidement une star aux États-Unis, grâce à des films tels que Elle, Arthur ou Une défense canon aux côtés d'Eddie Murphy.

Biographie

Moore was married and divorced four times: to actresses Suzy Kendall, Tuesday Weld (by whom he had a son, Patrick, in 1976), Brogan Lane, and Nicole Rothschild (one son, Nicholas, born in 1995).

He maintained good relationships with Kendall, Weld and Lane, but expressly forbade Rothschild to attend his funeral. At the time his illness became apparent he was going through a difficult divorce from Rothschild, despite sharing a house in Los Angeles with her and her previous husband.

Moore dated Susan Anton in the early 1980s, with much being made of their height difference: Moore at 5 feet 2.5 inches (1.59m) and Anton at 5 feet 11 inches (1.80m).

In 1994, Moore was arrested after Rothschild claimed he had beaten her before that year's Oscars. She later withdrew her charges.




Health and death
In April 1997, after spending five days in hospital in New York, Moore was informed that he had calcium deposits in the basal ganglia of his brain and irreversible frontal lobe damage.

In September 1997, Moore underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery in London.

In June 1998, Nicole Rothschild was reported to have told an American television show that Moore was "waiting to die" due to a serious illness, but these reports were denied by Suzy Kendall.

On 30 September 1999, Moore announced that he was suffering from the terminal degenerative brain disorder progressive supranuclear palsy, some of the early symptoms being so similar to intoxication that he had been reported as being drunk, and that the illness had been diagnosed earlier in the year.

Moore died on the morning of 27 March 2002, as a result of pneumonia, secondary to immobility caused by the palsy, in Plainfield, New Jersey. Rena Fruchter was holding his hand when he died, and she reported his final words were, "I can hear the music all around me." Moore was interred at Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Fruchter later wrote a memoir of their relationship (Dudley Moore, Ebury Press, 2004).


Honours and awards
In November 2001, Moore was appointed a Commander of the Order of The British Empire (CBE). Despite his deteriorating condition, he attended the ceremony in a wheelchair, at Buckingham Palace to collect his honour.


Filmography



Flatland (1965) (short)
The Wrong Box (1966)
Bedazzled (1967)
30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968)
The Bed-Sitting Room (1969)
Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969)
(aka Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978)
Foul Play (1978)
10 (1979)
BBC Horizon: "It's About Time" (1979)
Derek and Clive Get the Horn (1979)
The Muppet Show (1980) (TV)
Wholly Moses! (1980)
Arthur (1981)
Six Weeks (1982)
Lovesick (1983)
Romantic Comedy (1983)




Unfaithfully Yours (1984)
Micki + Maude (1984)
Best Defense (1984)
Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)
Like Father Like Son (1987)
Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)
The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1989)
Crazy People (1990)
Orchestra! (1991) (TV)
Blame It on the Bellboy (1992)
Really Wild Animals (1993)
Dudley (1993)
Concerto! (1993) (TV)
Daddy's Girls (1994) (TV)
Parallel Lives (1994)
Oscar's Orchestra (1994)
The Disappearance of Kevin Johnson (1995)
A Weekend in the Country (1996)
The Mighty Kong (1998)

Ses meilleurs films