William Henry Kerr (10 June 1922 – 28 August 2014) was a British and Australian actor, comedian, and vaudevillian.
Born in South Africa, he started his career as a child actor in Australia, before emigrating to Britain after the Second World War, where he developed a career as a performer in comedy, especially gaining notice in the radio version of Hancock's Half Hour. In 1979 Kerr returned to Australia and developed a second career as a character actor.
Biography
Kerr was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 10 June 1922<ref name="Telegraph">Obituary: Bill Kerr, Daily Telegraph, 29 August 2014</ref> to an Australian performing arts family, growing up in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. His career in show business began when he was very young. Wilton, his son, recalled: "His mum used him instead of using a prop, a baby prop, she actually used her son, her newborn son, so he was literally kind of born to do it."
Kerr began to work in radio for ABC in 1932, and continued performing child parts for about eight years. His first screen appearance was in Harmony Row (1933), where he gives a feisty performance as a juvenile delinquent alongside the great Australian vaudeville comedian George Wallace. Kerr's first dramatic role on screen was a high-profile one in the Cinesound film The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934), where he displays striking presence as a blind child. Kerr is one of the most important child performers in early Australian film. He saw service in the Australian army during the Second World War, and performed in theatrical shows at home and abroad and toured with his friend, the actor Peter Finch.
Career in Britain
After the war, Kerr moved to Britain in 1947. During the next few years he was regularly featured in the BBC radio series Variety Bandbox, part of the BBC Light Programme. Retaining his accent, an unusual choice for performers moving to Britain at this time, he was billed as "the boy from Wagga Wagga." A spokesman for the Australian town's museum said that this "struck an instant chord with the post-war British audience, who thought of 'Wagga Wagga' as a comically surreal, end of the earth, magical place somewhere left of Narnia." Harry Secombe described Kerr as having a "very laconic act" on the show, beginning his spots with the catchphrase "I'm only here for four minutes."
From 1954 to 1959, he had a regular role as an Australian lodger in the BBC radio comedy series Hancock's Half Hour. The series, with comedian Tony Hancock as the eponymous lead and also featuring Sid James, ran for six series. Initially sharper than Hancock's characterisation, Kerr's portrayal eventually developed into a more dim-witted character who became the butt of Hancock's jokes. Unlike James, Kerr did not feature in the television version of the Hancock series. Kerr also starred in the radio drama series The Flying Doctor (1958–63), regularly flying in and out of the fictitious Wollumboola base as he and his "doctor" colleague brought reprobates to justice in the outback. Later, after Sid James had ended his professional partnership with Hancock, Kerr briefly resumed working with him in the first series of the television comedy Citizen James (1960). Kerr's other television appearances in Britain include a Doctor Who serial called The Enemy of the World (1968), with Patrick Troughton, and a long-running part in the early 1960s BBC-TV soap, Compact.
Kerr had much theatrical success in Britain, playing the Devil disguised as Mr Applegate in the first West End production of Damn Yankees, directed by Bob Fosse and first performed in March 1957. He appeared in a touring production of the play The Teahouse of the August Moon in 1956. He also worked with Spike Milligan and appeared in Milligan and John Antrobus's stage play The Bed-Sitting Room, which opened at the Mermaid Theatre on 31 January 1963. (a)pp.203–204, (b)pp.242–243 A subsequent production opened on 3 May 1967 at the Saville Theatre, and "a cast containing an unusually high proportion of Australian actors including Kerr and David Nettheim." In the 1969 London production of Play It Again, Sam at the Globe Theatre, Kerr played Humphrey Bogart.