Peter Cook

Born
November 17, 1937 · Torquay, Devon, England, UK
Died
January 9, 1995 · Hampstead, London, England, UK (gastrointestinal hemorrhage)
Birth name
Peter Edward Cook
Height
1.88 m

Former comedy partner Dudley Moore was said to have based his title performance in Arthur (1981) partly on Cook, whose excessive drinking had soured his and Moore's comedic partnership in the 1970s.
He complained that David Frost's success was based on copying Cook's own stage persona and Cook dubbed him "the bubonic plagiarist", and said that his only regret in life, according to Alan Bennett, had been saving Frost from drowning. This incident occurred in the summer of 1963, when the rivalry between the two men was at its height. Cook had realised that Frost's potential drowning would have looked deliberate if he had not been rescued.
Voted greatest comedian of all time in a poll of comedians. 2005.
He and his third wife Lin lived in separate houses 100 yards apart in Hampstead.
He occasionally called in to Clive Bull's night-time phone-in radio show on LBC in London. Using the name "Sven from Swiss Cottage," he mused on love, loneliness, and herrings in a mock Norwegian accent. Jokes included Sven's attempts to find his estranged wife, in which he often claimed to be telephoning the show from all over the world, and his hatred of the Norwegian obsession with fish. While Bull was clearly aware that Sven was fictional, he only later learned of his real identity.

I've learned from my mistakes and I'm sure I can repeat them exactly.
I am very interested in the Universe - I am specialising in the Universe and all that surrounds it.
I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.
Being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, you have to go. Well, the very opposite applies with the judges. So all in all I'd rather have been a judge than a miner.
I could've been a judge, but I never had the Latin... I never had the Latin to get through the rigorous judging exams. They're very rigorous, the judging exams, very rigorous indeed. They're noted for their rigor. People come out of them saying, "My God, what a rigorous exam!" And so I become a miner instead. I managed to get through the mining exams. They're not very rigorous. There's no rigor involved really. There's a complete lack of rigor involved in the mining exams. They only ask you one question. They say, "Who are you?" And I got 75 percent on that.

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