THE LOVELIEST JOKE

One bright, balmy Hollywood morning in the mid 1930s, David Niven presented himself at Stage 29, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, for a screen test, “made up like a Piccadilly tart” and feeling ridiculous. When his turn came, he recited — “out of my panic” — an old schoolboy limerick featuring an old man of Leeds who swallowed a packet of seeds, with unfortunate foliage-bearing results for his nether regions. It wasn’t exactly a Hamlet soliloquy, but Hollywood had a vacancy for a stiff-upper-lipped Brit — the society hostess Elsa Maxwell had urged Niven westward, saying “nobody out there knows how to speak English, except Ronald Colman” — and a few weeks later, Niven was enrolled at Central Casting as “Anglo-Saxon Type No.2008”.

It was a billing that Niven more than lived up to over three decades in Hollywood, playing, as he put it, “officers, dukes and crooks” in such films as (1936), (1939), and 1956’s . His clipped vowels, pencil moustache, military bearing (he’d spent three years in the Highland Light Infantry) and slightly sardonic air made him the in 1958, he announced, on reaching the podium, that he was “loaded with lucky charms”, though any casual onlooker of his career would have noted the British mix of chutzpah and winging it that, with the requisite dollop of good fortune, had got him there.