91-летний Мелвин Хейз опубликовал автобиографию спустя 34 года после начала работы над ней

MELVYN Hayes, best known for his flamboyantly camp role as Gunner “Gloria” Beaumont in the 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, has finally got around to finishing his autobiography. The quick-witted nonegenarian has only been at it since 1986. While many Z-list celebrities release their autobiography a few years into fame, it’s refreshing to meet a genuine star with a career spanning an extraordinary seven and a half decades in show biz before he published his. “Nowadays, people just want to be famous for being famous. I don’t want to get involved. All I ever wanted to do was act, that was my thing. Anything that came with it was a bonus,” says the sprightly performer who turned 91 in January. Bless, it only took 34 years to write. The motivation, he said, was so his children (he’s got eight, but then he did marry three times) would understand what he got up to when he was working away far too often, earning a crust. “I wanted my children to know while I was away filming in places like Outer Mongolia, on some rubbish film that would never see the light of day, what I did for a living, what sort of people I worked with. “I should have been at their school handing out prizes or something,” he adds. “Suddenly, I had a very large family and wasn’t seeing them. That was the downside.” The other reason was as an excuse to visit the woman who became his third wife in 1992, actress Jayne Male. “She was working in an office, and I said, ‘Could I use your typewriter, your paper, your pens, et cetera. We’d only just met in a show.” He met the ‘love of his life ’ in 1986 whilst touring in a production of The Dresser and enjoyed 36 happy years together, which included running a pub in Warwickshire and fostering countless children. Following her untimely death from lung cancer four years ago (just two shocking days from diagnosis to demise), he packed up the contents of the home on the Isle of White and moved to London to live with their daughter Lily. “I was knocked for six,” he tells me. “It was a terrible shock. But I can still feel her behind me saying, you can do it, you can do it.” The book’s epilogue, written in 2024, states: ‘Living without my Jayne is unbearable. The pain doesn’t get any easier. She was my strength.’ The last chapter is 250 words penned in 2022. A mere 76 after her death in the September. He clearly did not have the heart to continue. An actor’s life for Melvyn It was Al Jolson what did it. Or, to be more precise, the 1946 Hollywood film The Jolson Story. After watching the juvenile actor Scotty Beckett as the young Jolson who gets discovered for his singing talent, our adolescent Hayes, who confesses not being able to sing, act, or dance at the time, had an epiphany. It was to be an actor’s life for all 5ft 3” of him. “I thought what a wonderful way to earn a living just by entertaining people, making them laugh. “And over the years, a number of people have stopped me in the street and have said, ‘thank you for all the laughs,” says Hayes. Published by Alliance Publishing Press, It Ain’t Half Late Mum, mainly spans from his birth in 1935 to the 1990s and is a good rollicking read, with many laugh-out-loud moments. Born Melvyn Hyams in 1935, the third of four children to Jewish parents in Wandsworth, the tome vividly documents how he started as a child performer in the early 1950s. He first took to the stage as a magician’s assistant, performing an Indian rope trick for £4 a week before establishing a career in local repertory theatre. Hayes recounts several amusing anecdotes, including when he was in a theatre production, Why the Chicken, with Terence Stamp as leading man. He asked director Lionel Bart if he could include Stamp’s jobless friend in the show. “I said to Lionel Bart, ‘Terry’s got a mate and he’s not working. Could you write [him] a little something?’ We were hoping to bring this show to the West End. “He said, well, I can only afford to pay him 20 quid. “So, I said to Michael Caine, ‘They are only going to pay you 20 quid.’ Michael replied, ‘Great, the only trouble is I’ve got an overdraft of £600. Where am I going to find a job that pays me that kind of money?’” A move into the movies followed. Think those gloriously carefree Cliff Richard classics: The Young Ones, Summer Holiday, and Wonderful Life, but not before he played the young Peter Cushing character in the Hammer Horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein “My first decent film,” says Hayes. He appeared in several of the iconic pictures. He has appeared in more than 50, including Carry On England in 1976 – the worst ever Carry On film, he says. “It was terrible.” His big TV break was in that aforementioned 1970s British comedy classic depicting a British Royal Artillery concert party in India during the final months of the Second World War. Written by sitcom legends Jimmy Perry and David Croft, responsible for Dad’s Army and Hi-Di-Hi, it went on to make Melvyn a household name. “I was lucky in that I had had 20 years of work beforehand, film, TV, stage, so I wasn’t typecast. “Gloria could have typecast me, but it didn’t, and I carried on working, doing films and TV.” It’s a list as long as your arm, including EastEnders and a guest appearance in Not Going Out, created and starring comedian Lee Mack three years ago. Mack is his hero at the moment: “I think that man is so good – he is so quick.” He met his second wife, the actress Wendy Padbury, and married in 1974 after being introduced by a mutual friend. Wendy, who was born in Stratford and educated at Alcester Grammar School, is remembered for being an early Doctor Who assistant to Patrick Troughton. Pershore is now her home, and where we meet him and their daughter Charlie (actor and voice artist), with whom he will be sharing the stage this Friday, September 11, at the Number 8 art centre in the town for an Evening with Melvyn Hayes. He will also be signing his book, which is peppered with amusing celebrity anecdotes, meeting royalty (Princess Anne was the nicest, apparently), encouraging the young Frank Finlay not to give up on acting, and a host of other tales. What is the secret of his long life? No smoking or drinking, a personal trainer and twice-weekly trips to the gym. Melvyn Hayes is never stuck for words or stories. He amusingly reminisces about how he nearly drowned twice, once during the filming of the opening scene of Wonderful Life. “I’m thrown into the sea a mile out and there’s big fish and forgot to tell the director I couldn’t swim…”