Dick Bentley

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Dick Bentley
Victoria
, Australia
Died27 August 1995(1995-08-27) (aged 88)
London, England
Occupation(s)Comedian and actor
SpousePetronella (Peta) Curra (1939–1991)

Charles Walter "Dick" Bentley (14 May 1907 – 27 August 1995) was an

Take It From Here for BBC Radio
. He was a staple of and pioneer of radio, having started his career in the medium in the early 1930s. He appeared on screen from the late 1940s until retiring in 1978.

Biography

Early life and radio

Bentley was born in

ABC Radio in the early 1930s and by 1938 had become a fairly prominent personality, notably on Wilfrid Thomas's show Out of the Bag.[1] In that year he moved to London, and worked for the BBC. Newly married to Petronella "Peta" Curra, with the war raging in England, he returned to Australia, and during the years of World War II
, he spent entertaining the troops in the Pacific theatre.

Return to Britain

By 1946, he was one of Australia's highest-paid entertainers and returned to Britain to try to re-establish himself in a much larger market. He joined up with writer

Take It From Here (1948–60), with Edwards and Bentley as two of the three stars. The most memorable feature of Take It From Here was The Glums
, with Edwards playing the slightly seedy Pa Glum and Bentley his terminally dim son, Ron. Bentley was thirteen years older than Edwards.

In 1951, during the run of Take It From Here, Bentley briefly returned to Australia to star in a ten-episode radio comedy series, Gently Bentley, commissioned to celebrate the silver jubilee of the ABC. In 1954, he starred in And So to Bentley, a sketch-format comedy show for the BBC, co-starring Peter Sellers. The show only lasted for one series, and the gently self-deprecating humour of Bentley was overshadowed by the charismatic Sellers. Both these shows were also written by Muir and Norden.

Films

After making his film debut in 1959, Bentley returned to Australia to play a sheep drover in The Sundowners (1960), starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. In the late 1960s, he was briefly back on BBC radio in the short-run comedy series If You Had a Talking Picture of Me. Bentley was featured in the movies The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974), derived from the Barry McKenzie comic strip in Private Eye. By 1974, he had largely retired but briefly returned to the screen to appear in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (1978) as Frank Spencer's grandad, fittingly since the hapless Spencer was in many ways a descendant of Bentley's Ron Glum character in TIFH.

Death

His wife died in January 1991, and Bentley died from complications from Alzheimer's disease in 1995.[2]

Filmography

Year Title Role Notes
1959 Desert Mice Gavin
1960 And the Same to You George Nibbs
1960 The Sundowners Shearer
1961 Double Bunk Ron Voice, Uncredited
1961 In the Doghouse Mr. Peddle
1962 The Golden Rabbit Insp. Jackson
1962 The Girl on the Boat American Uncredited
1963 Tamahine Storekeeper
1964 Gunfighters of Casa Grande Doc
1972 The Adventures of Barry McKenzie Detective
1974 Barry McKenzie Holds His Own Colin 'The Frog' Lucas

References

  1. ^ "He has lived on air for 35 years". The Australian Women's Weekly. National Library of Australia. 19 November 1958. p. 36. Retrieved 9 June 2012.
  2. ^ Denis Gifford (29 August 1995). "OBITUARY : Dick Bentley". The Independent.
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