The chat show host Michael Parkinson wrote that it "addled his talent and confused his personality", eroding "a virtuosity equalled by only a very few entertainers". įor 20 years, from 1974, Starr developed an addiction to Valium. Stuart Jeffries in his Guardian obituary of Starr wrote that his act was "pre-cerebral, unrepentantly sexist, often racist comedy that was rendered overwhelmingly obsolete by the late 1980s". His wit, wrote Mark Lawson, "relied on broad punchlines and silly slapstick".
He later starred in his own BBC series in 1976. A first attempt at his own series, Ready Freddie Starr (1974), was reduced to a single special programme because Starr had disputes with the production team at London Weekend Television (LWT).
įrom 1972, he was one of the main performers in the television series Who Do You Do? and a regular on the TV panel show Jokers Wild. Starr had a chart album titled After the Laughter and a UK Top 10 single, " It's You", in March 1974. During his career, he also impersonated Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. He appeared on the 1970 Royal Variety Performance during which he impersonated Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Still relatively unknown to television audiences, Starr was "discovered" through the talent show, Opportunity Knocks in 1967 where he appeared as part of comedy/ beat act Freddie Starr and the Delmonts, winning the popular vote each time over six weeks. During this period Starr's group performed in Hamburg's nightclubs, around the same time as the Beatles. The singles all failed to enter the charts. The group recorded three singles, each produced by Joe Meek. In the early 1960s, Starr was the lead singer of the Merseybeat pop group The Midniters (also spelt as Midnighters) which was managed by Brian Epstein. Under his birth name, he appeared as a teenager in the film Violent Playground (1958). For five years, he was a member of the Hilda Fallon Roadshow which toured community halls and hospitals.
Starr was encouraged by his mother to perform from the age of 12 working in clubs and pubs. His father died when Starr was in his early teens. He attended Sylvester's Primary, and later Huyton Secondary Modern. In his 2001 autobiography Unwrapped, Starr gives speech problems as the reason he spent two years away from home as a child. As a result of these experiences, he was teetotal for life. At the age of six, Starr stopped speaking, and was taken into care. In one incident, his father broke both of his son's legs. When his father, who was also a bare-knuckled boxer, was drunk he repeatedly beat Starr up when he was a young child. According to Starr, his mother Hilda ( née Feihnen) was from Germany and was Jewish. One of seven children, Starr was the son of a bricklayer, who was often unemployed. Starr was born in Huyton in the county of Lancashire, England.