His talent for portraying shameless skirt-chasers with lust-laden catchphrases – ‘Well, hell-oo’…’I sa-a-ay!’…’Ding dong!’ – made him a household name in the Doctor and Carry On films of the 1960s.
It also ensured that the poverty that had blighted his childhood was far behind him when, in later life, he tackled the weightier parts he yearned to play.
Yet nothing Leslie Phillips did on stage or screen could match the drama and pathos of his life’s final act – details of which I can now disclose, 21 months after his death at the age of 98 in 2022.
Almost exactly four years earlier, his will had been drawn up. But, in a brutal twist of fate, Phillips, who’d observed that he didn’t fear death ‘just illness and senility’, no longer had control of his own affairs which were, instead, administered by his solicitor, under the terms of the Mental Capacity Act.
Aware of this, the third and last of his wives – Zara, a former air stewardess, whom Phillips married in 2013 when he was 89 and she in her mid-50s – threatened legal action, convinced that she would have to leave the four-storey, £4million town house which she and Phillips shared in Maida Vale, West London.
Leslie Phillips (right) married former air stewardess Zara (left) in 2013 when he was 89 and she in her mid-50s
Zara (right) first encountered Phillips (left) at a zebra crossing close to his home
Phillips was best known for his ‘Ding Dong’, ‘Well, Hello’ and ‘I Say’ catchphrases during a career in which he acted in 150 films
Leslie Phillips poses for a photo with footballer Gary Mabbutt before the Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and Swansea City at Wembley Stadium on September 16, 2017, in what is one of the last pictures of the screen icon
It transpires that she was right. Probate has just been granted, valuing Phillips’s estate at £5.2million, while the terms of the will stipulate that the house is to be sold two years and nine months after his death – in other words, by July next year – and the proceeds put into trust.
Zara, who’d been previously widowed, first encountered Phillips, the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films, on a zebra crossing close to his home.
A year after they married, he suffered a massive stroke. For the next eight years, she cared for him at the house, which is crowded with antique bronzes, glassware and sepia-coloured photographs.
Zara could not be reached for comment yesterday, but insisted last year that she would not leave without a fight.
‘This is my marital home,’ she said. ‘I want to live here for the rest of my life.’
But Phillips had two sons and two daughters by his first wife, to each of whom he left £50,000, and nearly three-quarters of the shares in the trust fund the will establishes, while his 15 grandchildren each receive £5,000.
Barbara Roscoe and Leslie Phillips get close in 1964 film Father Came Too!
Charles chats with Leslie Phillips at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s gala fundraising dinner for their ‘Complete Works Festival’, in London, on May 17, 2006
Leslie Phillips played the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films franchise, seen here on the head of the boy wizard, played by Daniel Radcliffe
Zara is far from forgotten, however. She is left £155,000, plus ten of her late husband’s belongings – each worth up to £1,500 – and more than a quarter of the shares in the trust fund.
Ding dong!
