Hollywood embraces a most unlikely romantic lead
When he was six or seven and spending many of his days in British hospitals, a nurse gave Dudley Moore a good-night kiss. Her name was Pat, and 40 years later he can still feel the imprint of her lips on his cheek. He describes it in Proustian terms. "I almost spin when I think of it," he says. "She was truly an angel of mercy, and that kiss was probably the first taste of real, unqualified, uncomplicated affection I had ever had. In many ways my entire life is based on recapturing that single moment of affection."
These days that quest is closer to its goal than it ever was before. Moore, 47, has become America's newest, and least likely, romantic hero. At 5 ft. 2½ in., he looks up at all of his leading ladies. He is neither handsome nor intriguingly ugly, just nice looking, like millions of men in the paying public. But American audiences are now discovering what the British knew two decades ago. "He was known as Cuddly Dudley then," says Humorist Peter Cook, who collaborated with Moore through much of his career. "Whether women wanted to mother him or smother him, I don't know."
In "10," Moore's first megasuccess in film, Bo Derek did a little of both, accompanied by the hard-breathing beat of Ravel's Boléro. In Arthur, an even bigger hit, duties were shared by Liza Minnelli and John Gielgud, who played his long-suffering valet. There have been a couple of flops along the way, notably the ghoulish Six Weeks, whose bad reviews have left the star angry and bewildered.
In Lovesick, which opens on Feb. 18, Moore is a middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist who falls in love with a nubile patient and finds happiness under the ironic eyes of Sigmund Freud's fantasy-ghost (Alec Guinness). The film was written and directed by Marshall Brickman, who collaborated with Woody Allen on the screenplays of Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, and it has many of the funny, arch touches of Allen's best pictures. The early scenes, particularly, in which a motley group of patients pass through Moore's office, are hilarious, knowing satire at its best. But the script ravels, wandering into contrivance and predictability. Moore gives a subtle, warm, finely tuned performance, however, and Elizabeth McGovern, 21, who had attention-grabbing parts in Ordinary People and Ragtime, shows enormous promise as the patient who sets off his mid-life crisis. She has an unusual beauty, with dark hair and blue eyes as bright as headlights and a sandy voice reminiscent of Jean Arthur's. The two of them form an odd combination, but it works.
Moore has finished Romantic Comedy, based on Bernard Slade's Broadway play, which will be released in October, and he is now working on Unfaithfully Yours, a remake of the Preston Sturges comedy, in which he portrays a famous conductor, convinced that his beautiful young wife (Nastassia Kinski) is having an affair behind his back. Five years ago, Moore was a well-known British comic who had a small American public; today he is one of Hollywood's top box-office draws, cuddling to his own bosom a salary of $2½ million for his latest picture.