Freddie Starr

From Wikipedia:

Freddie Starr (born Frederick Leslie Fowell; 9 January 1943 – 9 May 2019) was an English stand up comedian, impressionist, singer and actor. Starr was the lead singer of Merseybeat rock and roll group the Midniters during the early 1960s, and came to prominence in the early 1970s after appearing on Opportunity Knocks and the Royal Variety Performance. In the 1990s, he starred in several television shows, including Freddie Starr (1993–1994), The Freddie Starr Show (1996–1998) and two episodes of An Audience with… in 1996 and 1997. In 1999, he presented the game show Beat the Crusher.

Early life

Starr was born in Ulster Road, Liverpool, (from his autobiography) England. At the age of four, he moved with his family to Huyton. One of seven children, Starr was the son of a bricklayer, who was often unemployed. According to Starr, his mother Hilda (née Feihnen) was from Germany and was Jewish. A twin brother died at birth. When his father, who was also a bare-knuckled boxer, was drunk he repeatedly beat Starr up when he was a young child. In one incident, his father broke both of his son’s legs. At the age of six, Starr stopped speaking, and was taken into care. As a result of these experiences, he was teetotal for life. In his 2001 autobiography Unwrapped, Starr gives speech problems as the reason he spent two years away from home as a child. He attended Sylvester’s Primary, and later Huyton Secondary Modern. His father died when Starr was in his early teens.

Starr was encouraged by his mother to perform from the age of 12 working in pubs and clubs. For five years, he was a member of the Hilda Fallon Roadshow which toured community halls and hospitals.

Entertainment career

Under his birth name, he appeared as a teenager in the film Violent Playground (1958). In 1961, Starr joined Derry and the Seniors and spent most of his time playing in Germany. In 1962, they became the first Liverpool beat group to record and later release an LP. After they disbanded in late 1962, Starr became the lead singer of the Merseybeat pop group The Midniters (also spelt as Midnighters) which was managed by Brian Epstein. The group recorded three singles, each produced by Joe Meek, all of which failed to enter the charts. During this period Starr’s group performed in Hamburg’s nightclubs, around the same time as the Beatles.

Still relatively unknown to television audiences, Starr was “discovered” through the talent show, Opportunity Knocks in 1967 where he appeared as part of comedy/beat act Freddie Starr and the Delmonts, winning the popular vote each time over six weeks. He appeared as the second act on the 1970 Royal Variety Performance during which he did comedy impersonations of Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Norman Wisdom and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. He was famous for impersonating Adolf Hitler in Wellington boots. During his career, he also impersonated Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. Starr released a number of albums during his career, one of which yielded a UK Top 10 single, “It’s You”, in March 1974. Two of his albums charted: After the Laughter in 1989 and The Wanderer in 1990.

From 1972, he was one of the main performers in the television series Who Do You Do? and a regular on the TV panel show Jokers Wild. A first attempt at his own series, Ready Freddie Starr (1974), was reduced to a single special programme because Starr had disputes with the production team at London Weekend Television (LWT). He later starred in his own BBC series in 1976. His wit, wrote Mark Lawson, “relied on broad punchlines and silly slapstick”. Stuart Jeffries in his Guardian obituary of Starr wrote that his act was “pre-cerebral, unrepentantly sexist, often racist comedy that was rendered overwhelmingly obsolete by the late 1980s”.

For 20 years, from 1974, Starr developed an addiction to Valium. The chat show host Michael Parkinson wrote that it “addled his talent and confused his personality”, eroding “a virtuosity equalled by only a very few entertainers”.

“Freddie Starr ate my hamster”

Freddie Starr was the subject of one of the best known British tabloid newspaper headlines. On 13 March 1986 The Sun carried as its main headline: “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster”. According to the text of the story, Starr had been staying at the home of his friend Vince McCaffrey and his 23-year-old girlfriend Lea La Salle in Birchwood, Cheshire, when the alleged incident took place. Starr was claimed to have returned home from a performance at a Manchester nightclub in the early hours of the morning and demanded that La Salle make him a sandwich. When she refused, he went into the kitchen and put her pet hamster Supersonic between two slices of bread and proceeded to eat it.

Starr gave his own account of the story in his 2001 autobiography Unwrapped, stating that the only time that he ever stayed at Vince McCaffrey’s house was in 1979, and that the incident was a complete fabrication. Starr writes in the book: “I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal”.

Initially the story had no effect on Starr’s career but soon proved beneficial. Tickets for a forthcoming tour had been selling slowly but, after the headline in The Sun, the publicity led to the addition of 12 dates to his itinerary and is believed to have boosted Starr’s fee by one million pounds. The man behind the hamster story was the British publicist, Max Clifford, at that time Starr’s agent, who concocted the story as a practical joke. When asked in a television interview with Esther Rantzen some years later whether Starr really had eaten a hamster, his reply was “Of course not”. Clifford was unapologetic, stating that the story had given a huge boost to Starr’s career.[citation needed]

In May 2006, the BBC nominated “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” as one of the most familiar British newspaper headlines over the last century.

Starr’s frustration at being linked perpetually to the hamster story was expressed in a 2007 newspaper interview, when he commented: “I’m fed up of people shouting out ‘Did you eat that hamster, Freddie?’ Now I say, give me £1 and I’ll tell you. Then if they give me £1, I say ‘No’ and walk away.” Starr says that the story came about after he made an offhand joke about eating a hamster in a sandwich.[dead link]

The Sun‘s front-page headline after Starr’s death was “Freddie Starr Joins His Hamster”.[importance?]

Later career

Starr appeared in Freddie Starr (1993–94) and The Freddie Starr Show (1996–98) made by Central. At the beginning of his appearance on LWT’s An Audience with Freddie Starr in 1996, he threw handfuls of live maggots at the audience. Nevertheless, Another Audience with Freddie Starr followed in 1997. This time he hit eggs with a golf club into the audience.

Starr was the owner of Miinnehoma, the winning horse in the 1994 Grand National race. He was not present on the day because of television commitments elsewhere, but gave an unusual post-race interview live on television to presenter Des Lynam via a mobile phone, with the television viewers able only to hear Lynam’s responses to what Starr was saying.

In March 2009, Starr appeared in Living with the Dead, a reality television show about people being haunted by ghosts. Freddie claimed his 1930s house was being haunted by an evil entity which he called George. During the show it appeared that he was possessed by this entity. It was later revealed that the entity’s name was Roger. During the episode, Freddie says that since he was a boy he was always spiritual and firmly believed in ghosts.

Starr was due to tour in 2010, but the tour was cancelled when he suffered a major heart attack in April 2010, resulting in quadruple heart bypass surgery. The tour dates were rescheduled for 2011 after he recovered.

Starr participated in the 2011 series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, but withdrew for health reasons. His last tour was in 2015 which included a reviewed date at the Royal Hippodrome Theatre in Eastbourne with his last performance being at the Princes Theatre in Clacton-On-Sea. […]

Albums, EPs & singles by Freddie Starr