Peter Wyngarde

Name Wyngarde's name as a child was Cyril Goldbert, and in reporting his death, BBC News gave his full name as Cyril Louis Goldbert. Date and place of birth By his own account, Wyngarde was born on 23 August 1933. On 14 December 1945, he arrived in England on the SS Arawa, and the ship's passenger list gives his age as 18, suggesting he was born before 15 December 1927. then as 27 July 1929 on the way home to England in October. In 2003, The Encyclopedia of British Film gave the year as 1927, and the registration of his death states his date of birth as 23 August 1927. A biography published in 2020 which draws on personal knowledge of Wyngarde and on a large archive gives his date of birth as 28 (not 23) August 1928. Most official documents state the year as 1927 or 1929, while the more informal sources have reported a range between 1924 and 1937. After speaking to his mother in September 1956, The Straits Times said he was then aged 26. Wyngarde was first included on an electoral register at Belsize, Hampstead, in 1948, which might support 1927 as his year of birth, as only those aged 21 and over were allowed to vote in the United Kingdom at that time. Wyngarde's mother seems to have told The Straits Times that he was born in Marseilles, France, Throughout his life, Wyngarde gave Marseilles as his place of birth, and this is the view taken by the biography published in 2020. and the biography published in 2020 names him as Henry Goldbert. Born in 1897, his parents were Marco Goldbert and Rosa Klivger, and in April 1904 Mrs Goldbert took over the license of the Singapore Hotel in North Bridge Road. In 1910, her licence was moved to another address. In December 1906, Henry Goldbert won a school prize for "Scripture (Jews)", and in 1913 he was taking YMCA Engineering Classes and was about to sit for a Board of Education South Kensington certificate. Wyngarde's mother was Marcheritta Marie Goldbert, born Ahin (1908–1992), known as Madge. In interviews, Wyngarde said she was French. There was a Eurasian family called Ahin living in Singapore. In 1947, she stated the name and nationality of her father as Andrew Nicolich Ahin, deceased, Swiss. In June 1934, in Singapore, a "V. Ahin", described as a young Eurasian mechanic and a brother of Mrs Golbert (sic), was fined fifteen Straits dollars for his behaviour in March in trying to stop the posting of a summons on his sister's door in Kim Yean Road. A Victor Ahin was noted in 1941 as a nephew of Mr P. A. Ahin, chief engineer in the dredging section of the Public Works Department. Wyngarde had two younger Goldbert siblings: Adolphe Henry Peter Goldbert (1930–2011), and Marion Colette Simone Goldbert (1932–2012). In 1946, they also came by ship from Shanghai to England, arriving at Southampton on RMS Strathmore on 30 April 1946, aged sixteen and thirteen, both stating their destination as Prenton, Birkenhead. In England, Adolphe dropped his first name and was known as "Joe". Wyngarde met his brother and sister after their arrival, but had little further contact with them or their children. A sea port of the Russian Empire, in the later 19th century about a fifth of Mykolaiv's population was Jewish, and although the community suffered a pogrom in 1899, the same was true in 1926. The surname Goldbert is rare, with only some 118 people worldwide known to be using it in 2025, almost half of them living in Israel. If Cyril and Henry Goldbert's family were Jewish, conversions to Christianity were then common in the Russian Empire, and Wyngarde's biographer reports that Henry Goldbert was a Roman Catholic. Henry Goldbert sailed on the RMS Britannic from Port Said to Liverpool in August 1944, giving his age as 47 and his occupation as Marine Engineer, then some months later from Manchester to New York City, arriving there in May 1945. Social security records in the United States give his date of birth as 1897 and his birthplace as "Hicolieff", Soviet Union, and name his parents. Esther Risoff Goldbert had been naturalized as a US citizen in California in 1938. Perhaps coincidentally, Wyngarde visited San Francisco in July 1960. whose career in the British Diplomatic Service was in Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and India, before he became an importer and exporter of antique watches living in Eaton Square, London. that they divorced in 1937, and that Wyngarde's mother soon married Charles Leo Juvet and had a son called Paul Edouard Juvet, born in 1938. There was a Swiss horological family called Juvet based in Shanghai. It was first reported in April 1950 that Wyngarde was a maternal nephew of the French actor-director Louis Jouvet, and this was still being written about twenty years later. Evidence that his mother was a sister or sister-in-law of Louis Jouvet is lacking, and Jouvet appears to be unrelated to the Swiss Juvet family. However, when Paul Edouard Juvet died at Geneva in 1998, Wyngarde is reported to have taken responsibility for settling his affairs and paying for his funeral. In 1952, Wyngarde's brother was married in the Church of England, at All Saints Church, Tudeley, He was then serving in the Royal Navy and was described in a local newspaper as "second son of Mr and Mrs H. Goldbert of Kuala Lumpur Malaya". He died at the age of 81 in 2011. Early life Wyngarde's mother told The Straits Times in 1956 that her son had spent "his first few years" in Malaya. , Shanghai, about 1930 Before internment, Wyngarde was educated at the Western District Public School for Boys in Yuyuan Road, Shanghai, where after the arrival of the Japanese there were compulsory lessons in Japanese. In April 1943, Wyngarde was interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre. There were some 300 children in the camp, who continued their education at a school called the Lunghua Academy. This had "a full-scale syllabus which met the requirements of the then School Certificate" and taught maths, French, English, Latin, history, and general science. Outside the classroom, there were football, hockey, and softball, plus concerts and dances. J. G. Ballard was also there and travelled to Britain in 1945 with Wyngarde and other former internees. He later wrote of this period Ballard also claimed Wyngarde had told him he was planning to use the stage name of Laurence Templeton. For some years Wyngarde denied knowing Ballard or said he could not remember him, but in an undated letter published by his biographer in 2020 he said he had "pinned down" Ballard as a boy he had known in the camp who at the time was called Bryant. In one interview in the 1970s, Wyngarde said he was interned as an unaccompanied five-year-old, due to an administrative error, but this appears to be part of a scheme to lower his age, since the records show that he was interned from the age of fifteen to just before his 18th birthday. He began acting during his internment, when he played all the characters in a version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Interviewed by Ray Connolly in 1973, Wyngarde said: "As a child it was difficult to differentiate sometimes between fact and fantasy". Following the Surrender of Japan, the internment camps were liberated in August 1945. Cyril Goldbert left Shanghai that autumn and travelled to England on the Cunard-White Star Line ship Arawa. Passenger records show that he travelled alone, aged eighteen, and arrived in Southampton on 14 December 1945. The Guardian newspaper said of Wyngarde in March 2020 that "his life story is shrouded in mystery". His own accounts of his life after leaving Shanghai for England appear to have been embellished with a history of medical treatment and education. This helped to account for the six-year gap created by his claim to have been a 12-year-old boy when he left Shanghai, rather than a man of eighteen. He said he had spent two years in a Swiss sanatorium, recovering from his war experiences. He was always vague about his education, but hinted that he had attended schools in Switzerland, France, and England, after which he had briefly studied law at Oxford and had worked in a London advertising agency for a while, before starting work as a professional actor. ==Career==