Dudley Moore
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Dudley Moore
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Elfin, quick-witted British comic actor Dudley Moore, who was best known for his role as the lecherous composer in the 1979 film 10 and as the lovable millionaire drunk in 1981’s Arthur, died Wednesday morning at his New Jersey home of pneumonia, a complication of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to his publicist. He was 66.

A brilliant pianist and composer, the 5′ 2 1/2″ entertainer had been in ill health for several years. His illness, a debilitating neurological disorder, affected both his motor and mental functions, and by the time of his death, Moore had lost the ability to speak and was almost immobile. In November 2001, he was named a Commander of the British Empire; it was the last time he was seen in public.

“He said he was waiting to die,” Moore’s estranged wife Nicole Rothschild told the TV show Extra in June 1998, and that “there was really nothing left for him here.” Rothschild, Moore’s fourth wife, had previously filed a lawsuit against her husband, charging him with assault, battery and domestic violence. She dropped the charges that year when she discovered how ill he had become.

Despite a career that included numerous awards for his performances on both stage and screen — two Tonys (for Beyond the Fringe in 1963 and Good Evening in 1974), two Golden Globe Awards (1981’s Arthur and 1985’s Mickey + Maude) and a Best Actor Oscar nomination (for Arthur) – as well as notable successes as a concert pianist and jazz musician, Dudley Moore’s popularity was more enduring in his homeland than in America.

“Only the British media persist in treating Moore as a superstar: the local lad who made good,” said Britain’s The Independent newspaper in 1994. “Like Peter Sellers before him, he is a highly gifted British export who left a creative British career behind for fleeting fame, some riches, but sadly, little fulfillment in America.”

From an early age Dudley Moore had to deal with physical and psychological problems. Born with a club foot, he underwent eight years of surgeries to correct the deformity and was often left alone in hospitals alongside dying soldiers where, he told biographer Barbra Paskin (in his 1997 authorized biography), he developed an often overwhelming fear of abandonment.

Moore, the son of a railroad electrician and a typist, grew up in Dagenham, a modest area of London dominated by a giant Ford plant. As a result of his left leg being more than an inch shorter than his right, his schoolmates nicknamed him “Hopalong.” “I felt unworthy of anything,” he once told Time magazine, “a little runt with a twisted foot.”

In an attempt to curry favor with his peers, he became the classic school jokester, a role he continued in the drama society at Oxford, which he attended on a music scholarship. By the time he left the university in 1958 (with dual degrees in music and composition), he was a prolific composer, an accomplished jazz musician and a member of a comic revue called Beyond the Fringe, which went on to become a brilliant success on both the London stage and Broadway.

After Fringe, Moore won further acclaim on both the British stage and TV. He moved to the U.S. after falling in love with American actress Tuesday Weld, whom he married in 1975. She was his second wife, after British actress Suzy Kendall; the third was Brogan Lane, whom he married in 1988. He also had a long relationship with actress Susan Anton.

Once in the U.S., Moore quickly became a Hollywood movie star, with such hits as 1978’s Foul Play, 10 and Arthur. However, his career then took a downward path with the cancellation of two short-lived TV series and the box-office failure of his last few movies (his last feature, Blame It on the Bellboy, was in 1992).

As his popularity on the big screen began to wane, the self-proclaimed “sex thimble” — who said in a Playboy interview that he was obsessed with sex and believed it to be central to the enjoyment of life — returned to his musical roots, carving out a career as a concert pianist, a recording artist and host of such TV series as Concerto! and Orchestra!

During his last years Moore lived in New Jersey while seeking treatment at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation. He is survived by two sons, Patrick (with Weld) and Nicholas (with Rothschild).

— MEREDITH MURRAY

Read PEOPLE’s 1999 article about Moore’s illness.