Biography

Michael Bentine

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When he appeared at the London Palladium in 1948, sporting an untidy black beard, he brought the house down with a five-minute act using the back of an antique chair which became a ships rudder, a harp, a flag, a comb and a cows udder. He was booked for the Royal Variety show and looked set for stardom, but five years of obscurity followed, during which time he toured the States and spent two years in Australia. Back in Britain, he made the comedy film The Sandwhich Man. He periodically went to a West London rifle range to shoot clay pigeons.
- IMDb mini biography by: Tonyman 5

He was the godfather of Peter Sellers's son Michael and claimed that the boy had been named after him. When, following Peter Sellers's death, Michael Sellers put his name to a defamatory book about his father (actually ghosted), Bentine said that, had he known at the christening that he was going to write it, "I'd have drowned the little bugger in the font!".
Three of his five children died before he did. His two eldest daughters, Elaine & Marylla ('Fusty') died from cancer (breast cancer and lymphoma) and Stuart ('Gussie') died in a plane crash in southern England. Only Richard ('Peski') and Serena ('Suki') survived him. The circumstances surrounding Stuart's death - a private plane not filing a flight plan which caused enormous delay and difficulties in locating the downed aircraft - prompted him to successfully press for new regulations in registering flight plans for small private aircraft.
The ex-Goon awoke from a coma when King Charles III visited him in hospital.
The RAF Red Arrows display team volunteered to make a fly past at his funeral to honour him, as their unofficial mascot.
He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1995 Queen's New Year Honours List for his services to entertainment.

Speaking of his experience of his part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration camp: Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I've tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won't come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.

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