Which Is the Real Hoar-Stevens?

Some of the biggest names in British exports are double-barreled: Rolls-Royce, Mini-Minor, Terry-Thomas. Even without the hyphen, the actor's face would probably have made his name familiar the world over. Its features are a bounderish British blend of sad sack and pukka sahib: busby brows that shoot up in startled innocence or beetle down with Mac the Knife malevolence; lugubrious eyes rocketing around like apoplectic billiard balls; a Scotch-sodden thatch of mustache, and, of course, those two front teeth, gaping wide as Becher's Brook. Wherever he takes a stroll, from Soho to Sunset Boulevard, Terry-Thomas is stopped by little old ladies who ask him to smile. When he obliges, they always exclaim: "It's real!"

Tennis, Anyone? So is Terry-Thomas. Though after 30 films he has virtually monopolized the comic English codger role and added his own lunatic stripe to the Old School Tie, it is often hard to tell whether he is spoofing the upper-crust Briton or simply being one. On his travels, like any Blimp setting off on safari, he packs his portmanteaus with sartorial accouterments for every conceivable occasion: white flannels for tennis, plus fours for golf, blazer for cricket, bowler, boater and deerstalker, tweeds, pinstripes, tails. Everything but the old elephant gun. He claims that he needs all those togs for professional use, but offstage he is seldom seen wearing the wrong suit or the same one twice. In real life he is as wildly gallant and exaggeratedly debonair as any character he impersonates.

Born 54 years ago in London, he even started life with a name that sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse character: Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens. He went to the right schools, but somehow turned out wrong. His trouble was that he was a compulsive clown, a tendency he blames on his eccentric dental structure, a hereditary trait with the Hoar-Stevenses. He had little thought of working until he was 27, since "my father bought my clothes and women and things." But then a pal persuaded him to take a crack at the films.

Mot Snevets. During a brief career as a shillings-a-day extra at Ealing Studios, Tom Hoar-Stevens resisted a friend's advice to "get your teeth fixed, for God's sake," decided to fix his name instead. He tried wearing it backward until Mot Snevets palled, then became Thomas Terry, which made too many people think that he was a by-blow of the famed acting family. Finally he hit on Terry-Thomas and qualified for the export trade.

Since his first film break in Private's Progress, he has played virtually every Anglo-Saxon subspecies from crook to cad, fop to daredevil. He does most of his own stunts, trembling with fear.

Says he: "I have stood up--stood up--in a glider, climbed the outside of a house, gone 10,000 feet up in a cable car with no bottom, driven a 1932 Austin Seven with no brakes."

A few years ago, Terry-Thomas moved in on Hollywood, where he was asked by a reporter why he accepted such small parts. He replied grandly:

"I'm too busy to do big ones." He's still busy. In two current hits, he plays Jack Lemmon's bon vivant butler in How To Murder Your Wife and the villainous Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Terry-Thomas has another film about to be released and a fourth scheduled. Making an appearance last week as a TV narrator, he injected some sly Saxon humor into an ABC documentary on gambling by extolling the outdoor life of the English racing tout: "Ah, the fine, crisp crinkle of pound notes in the clean air!" That was the real Terry-Thomas talking.

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