Anthony Newley was singer, a songwriter, actor, film director, screenwriter, but what made him stand apart from other renaissance men was that he was brilliant at all of them, well almost all of them. He started his career as an actor in the 1940s and played the artful dodger in David Lean’s film version of Oliver Twist. In the early 1960s Newley became a recording artist and was Britain’s own one man rat pack. Sammy Davis Jr wanted to BE him, because not only was Newley a brilliant performer, he along with his song writing partner Leslie Bricusse actually wrote all of their own songs, which was something Sammy couldn’t do. Sammy went on to record many of Newley and Bricusse’s songs. Between them Newley and Bricusse wrote Feeling Good the song made famous by Nina Simone amongst many others, they wrote the words for Goldfinger from the Bond film of the same name, they wrote all of the songs from the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie, and many, many other hits.

In 1960 Newley teamed up with Morcombe and Wise’s then writers Sid Green and Dick Hills and made the metaphysical sitcom The Strange World of Gurney Slade in which a sitcom star becomes self-aware and walks off the set of his own show and starts having conversations with dogs and rocks and things. That aired 26 years before It’s Garry Shandling’s Show which did basically exactly the same thing to universal acclaim. The Strange World of Gurney Slade, a show that was too weird for the 1960s. A young David Bowie became obsessed with this show, and started to emulate it’s star, and that’s why David Bowie sings like Anthony Newley, and why Bowie’s early songwriting is in the style of Anthony Newley. Last year Johnny Depp even claimed that his vocal performance in the film Sweeney Todd was based on Newley.

By the end of the 60s Newley was one of the biggest stars in the world and was given a complete creative control to make his own movie. Newley wrote, directed, and starred in the semi auto-biograhical picture Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?. You can see this movie along with a selection of TV clips and an episode of Gurney Slade at the BFI Southbank on 30th April.