Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: The odd couple
Neil Clark
PETER COOK and Dudley Moore were unlikely comic partners.
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The pair appeared in such films as Bedazzled, in which Cook played the Devil, and the international comedy Monte Carlo Or Bust, as two stiff-upper-lipped British rally drivers. Cook was married with two young daughters. Moore was married to the actress Suzy Kendall. But things were not as rosy as they might have appeared.

Moore was depressed. "The futility of my life and of every sort of activity is overwhelming," he wrote in his diary. "The knowledge that the way out of this impasse is hidden from me is intolerable." Cook meanwhile was having an affair with a married woman. He told his wife Wendy about it and was shocked when she suggested that they divorce. He moved in with his lover. As his private life became ever more complicated he started to drink more and to gamble compulsively on horse racing. Cook's drinking first caused cracks to appear in his relationship with Moore while the two of them toured Australia in 1971. He received a telegram to say that his daughter Daisy had to go into hospital after an acute asthma attack. He responded by hitting the bottle. "To my mind he became an alcoholic from that moment on," Moore recalled. "After that it seemed like he was drunk every night."

The men's sibling-like rivalry came out during their time Down Under. With Cook crashed out drunk in his hotel room, Moore attempted to seduce his partner's girlfriend Judy in the foyer. Cook came down in the lift dressed only in his underpants. "Come back upstairs," he called to Judy. Later during an American tour Moore had an affair with the actress Tuesday Weld, whom he married. Cook also slept with her.

By now Cook was not only an alcoholic but was addicted to pills and was a regular user of cannabis. When the pair's stage show Behind The Fridge opened in London the start had to be delayed for half an hour while he sobered up. Moore had always been the butt of Cook's jokes but by now he had grown tired of his partner's put-downs and drunkenness. "Peter was a very, very nice and kind person who when drunk would become vicious and unpleasant. And he took it out particularly on Dudley and broke up the partnership," says Cook's friend Richard Ingrams, former Private Eye editor. Moore's addiction, by contrast, was sex. He tried to sleep with as many women as he could. Throughout his adult life he spent a fortune on psychoanalysis.

The partnership looked finished until they gained a new generation of admirers in the late Seventies when recordings they had made as Derek and Clive, two obscenityspouting idiots, were commercially released. Cook then co-wrote a 1978 film version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles starring the two of them that flopped. For Moore it was the end of the partnership.

His portrayal of a middle-aged man searching for the perfect woman in the film 10, starring opposite Bo Derek, catapulted him to Hollywood stardom and made him an unlikely sex symbol. Cook did not call Moore to congratulate him. "He must have been jealous. He never said a word about any of my films - never even said he'd seen them," Moore complained.

While Cook had scoffed at Moore's Hollywood ambitions he set off to the US himself to look for work. He took a taxi into Los Angeles from the airport but ended up stuck in a long traffic jam. The taxi driver got out to see what was causing the delay. "You'll never believe this," said his star-struck cabbie. "It's Dudley Moore up there!" Cook did land a role, playing an English butler in a comedy, but the show was axed after just one series. That same month Moore was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as a drunken millionaire in the film Arthur. "I used to call him a club-footed dwarf and I think that was good for him," Cook declared. "Everyone else used to pussyfoot round his problems." Moore was upset by the comment and phoned Cook to discuss it. Cook did not return his message.

In the Eighties Cook's third wife Lin, seeing how much her husband missed his old partner, attempted to heal the rift. She went to see Moore and told him how much her husband loved him. The pair appeared on a chat show together. For once Cook showed great tenderness towards his partner but Moore was determined not to work with him again. Cook attended Alcoholics Anonymous but after his mother's death in 1994 he started drinking heavily again. He died of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage in January 1995 aged 57. Moore attended his memorial service.

In 1999, having been divorced four times, Moore announced that he had a rare neurological condition for which there was no cure. He could no longer play his beloved piano and he died in March 2002, aged 66. The two young comics who had lit up the Sixties both died prematurely. In the end their relationship floundered because they had been so close. As William Cook says in his book: "Like a married couple they knew too well how to hurt each other because they knew each other so well."

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