The leading entertainment agent and producer Peter Charlesworth, who has died aged 93, was both an aide to, and confidant of, some of the biggest names in British show business since the second world war: Shirley Bassey, Barbara Windsor, Joan Collins, Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, to name but a few.
Always impeccably groomed and suited, with an innate twinkle about him and a pronounced south London accent that he tried to disguise (but never did), Charlesworth belonged to that lost breed of gentlemen agents who all seemed somehow related to David Niven, full of charm and savoir faire, and steadying rocks for their clients.
But unlike, say, others in the same line such as Laurie Evans, James Sharkey or Julian Belfrage, whose backgrounds were decidedly “posh” theatrical, Charlesworth was a streetwise operator from a lowly background who benefited from developing a lively, creative rapport with such Londoners as Max Bygraves and the multi-talented Anthony Newley.
His passport to their world was through his skill at what used to be known in the music business as a “record plugger” and his love of jazz, which led to an early association with the jazz drummer, producer and agent Jock Jacobsen at the start of the 1960s.
By the end of that decade, he was shepherding Judy Garland through her final, chaotic appearances in London at the Talk of the Town. In Rupert Goold’s fine 2019 movie Judy, starring Renée Zellweger, his role was incorporated into the character of Garland’s friend and amanuensis, Rosalyn Wilder, played by Jessie Buckley.
Garland loved to eat fish and chips when in London and Charlesworth often accompanied her, and her two children, Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft, to a chippie in Holland Park, where they ate from the newspaper wrapping on a park bench.
Two years earlier he had been more directly portrayed by the actor Alex Macqueen in the BBC television film Babs, based on Windsor’s autobiography; Macqueen got Charlesworth’s suavity, voice and baldness down to a T, while Babs appeared as herself, backed up by a tremendous Samantha Spiro, and Zoë Wanamaker as the director Joan Littlewood.
Windsor was fond of Charlesworth and asked him to accompany her to Broadway for a premiere there in the late 1960s. She was then married to the nightclub owner Ronnie Knight, who promised to break Charlesworth’s legs if Babs went off the rails in the US. She did in fact have a short fling with Warren Beatty, but kept schtum – nobody ever knew, and Charlesworth avoided the punishment.
He was born in south-west London, the only child of Margaret (nee Jupp) and Thomas Charlesworth, an architectural blacksmith at T Crowther & Sons, an architectural antiques business on the Fulham Road. Peter attended St Mark’s secondary school, just a few blocks away from the family home in Inglethorpe Street, very near the Thames and Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage ground.
He left school aged 15 and was employed first as a page boy at Claridge’s hotel and then as a waiter in one of the renowned theatrical haunts of the day – Verrey’s in Regent Street, or Isow’s in Berwick market, it’s not clear which. He made contacts there that led to his employment as a record plugger and junior partner with Jacobsen.
When Jacobsen died, Charlesworth was well-known and confident enough to launch his own company, Peter Charlesworth Ltd, in 1979 in South Kensington, and bought a house in Notting Hill. Many of the big names followed him, but not Bygraves, who complained that Charlesworth “looked too much like a second-hand car salesman”, despite the grooming.
He had many girlfriends, only one of whom, Lynne Frederick, was a client; they dated at the peak of her early, short-lived stardom and before her brief marriages to first Peter Sellers and then David Frost.
Early on, Charlesworth and Jacobsen had a spectacular West End flop when they brought over an all-American cast, including an unknown Elliott Gould, in Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s On the Town in 1963. It closed at the Prince of Wales after just 63 performances. Charlesworth disliked the production, and Gould’s performance, bemoaning his bad luck and big financial loss.
At the first night dinner, Gould asked Charlesworth if he would take on the London representation of his girlfriend, soon-to-be wife; Charlesworth grumpily turned him down flat, saying his books were full. The name Barbra Streisand, then embarking on her breakthrough year in New York, meant nothing to him. But she was back on the same Prince of Wales stage in 1966, pregnant with her son Jason with Gould, knocking ’em dead in Funny Girl.
Charlesworth and Jacobsen had more success with an ebullient production of Lady Be Good by Guy Bolton and the Gershwin brothers at the old Saville theatre in 1968, starring Lionel Blair, Aimi MacDonald and Joe Baker.
His monumental list of colleagues and clients included the entertainers Anita Harris and Avril Angers, singers Denis Lotis and Jess Conrad, the comedian Jimmy James, and the genteel drag act Hinge and Bracket.
Although no one he knew, according to his friend and publicity agent Peter Benda, ever met his parents, Charlesworth remained true to his father’s vocation by occasionally taking a stall at the Battersea decorative antiques fair, where he was often to be seen chatting and comparing notes on antique guns of the Napoleonic era with the actor Michael Gambon, a fellow expert in that field.
• Peter Thomas Charlesworth, theatrical agent and producer, born 3 April 1931; died 8 July 2024
