The ‘English Elvis’: Tommy Steele’s 65 years in the spotlight

Within four months, one newspaper had voted Steele “Teenager of the Year”. A film based on his life followed in 1957, as did his debut in panto and his first Royal Variety Performance.

For Lassandro, the clue to Steele’s success is obvious: “He’s an all-rounder who can’t be pigeonholed. He has a quality that can’t be taught, that connects over the footlights to the audience. He has always been a happy-go-lucky boy from Bermondsey who just loves to perform – more like Al Jolson and Gracie Fields then Elvis Presley in that respect.”

Whatever the image that was being constructed of Steele as a performer – attracting a following described as “cult-like” by one contemporary commentator – behind the carefully crafted facade was a personality as self-aware as it was shrewd.

His ambition was abetted by canny impresarios – Larry Parnes masterminded his short-lived rock’n’roll career alongside John Kennedy, while Harold Fielding, dubbed “The Guv’nor” by Steele, shepherded his rise to fame on stage and screen – a role, more recently, taken up by producer Bill Kenwright.

Steele’s first significant stage venture was in a role described by Lassandro as “the Buttons character”, specially written for him for the 1958 London premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella at the London Coliseum. The score also featured one of Steele’s own songs, the only time the Broadway icons sanctioned the use of another writer’s material in their shows.

‘Audiences haven’t seen the last of Tommy Steele’ – Sebastian Lassandro

In 1960, he made his well-received straight theatre debut as Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer on London’s Old Vic stage, holding his own in a cast that included Judi Dench and Peggy Mount. It was, he later remarked, “the biggest career move that I made”.

At the end of the decade, Steele confirmed his credentials as a stage actor of considerable craft and comic dexterity as Truffaldino in Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at the Queen’s (now Sondheim) Theatre.

From there on, the stage dominated Steele’s career, a trajectory accelerated by the success of Half a Sixpence at the Cambridge Theatre in 1963. By sheer force of personality, Steele made the piece his own, his rendition of Flash, Bang, Wallop stealing both the show and its subsequent film version.

Its Broadway transfer alerted Hollywood to the star quality of the self-styled “Bermondsey boy”, Walt Disney quickly headlining him in 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire.

Francis Ford Coppola’s quixotic musical fantasy Finian’s Rainbow paired him, in the unlikely role of a leprechaun, with hallowed song-and-dance veteran Fred Astaire the following year.

It was a performance that later caught the eye of Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino, who declared himself a fan and said: “I’ve always liked Tommy Steele.”

A headlining season at the legendary Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1971 cemented Steele’s transatlantic appeal, although his reflex – despite the lavish enticements of Hollywood – was always to return to the UK and to the stage.

Having directed self-written documentaries about his childhood and Charlie Chaplin for the BBC, Steele made his directorial stage debut with Hans Andersen, in which he also played the Danish author, at the London Palladium in 1974.

Perhaps his most audacious undertaking, more so even than playing Feste to Ralph Richardson’s Toby Belch and Alec Guinness’ Malvolio for ITV in 1970, was his staging of Singin’ in the Rain at the Palladium in 1983.

Taking the role made famous by Gene Kelly – with whom he had performed on a US TV special in 1965 – Steele, after lengthy negotiations overseen by Fielding, made it his own.

Another Hollywood classic, Some Like It Hot, followed in 1992 at the Prince Edward Theatre, but it would be more than a decade (concert tours aside) before Steele returned, cast against type, to the West End as Dickens’ bah-humbugging Scrooge at the Palladium in 2005.

It was a role – memorably described by Steele as “the song-and-dance man’s King Lear” – he returned to often over the ensuing decade, having toured in the intervening years as the fabled animal interpreter Doctor Dolittle.

In 2015, aged 79, he launched a national tour of The Glenn Miller Story, his pulling power attracting audiences until as recently as 2018 at the London Coliseum.

Away from the stage, Steele published two novels (one for children), was a Royal Academy-exhibited artist and a noted sculptor – his rugby-inspired work is displayed at Twickenham Stadium and his depiction of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby is positioned close to Liverpool’s venerated Cavern Club.

With his 85th birthday in December, Steele shows no sign of retiring, says Lassandro. “He’s always thinking of potential future projects. Audiences haven’t seen the last of Tommy Steele just yet.”

Sebastian Lassandro’s Tommy Steele: A Life in the Spotlight is published by Fonthill