Many of his friends seem to have been in the same boat, though maybe this was the circle he mixed in, many of them constantly threatened by the fear of rejection and yet unable to cope with success when it did occur. Peter Cook says you could be the funniest comic actor in the world if you tried a little harder and stretched yourself a little more,’ someone informs him at this point.

Biographer Christopher Stevens has uncovered the depth of the star's friendship with a young gay couple who have never spoken publicly before and who were witness to Williams's long and bitter struggle with his sexual identity. I think we live in an increasingly uncertain world - more and more people want to understnad not only themselves but the world around them. When he was writing his autobiography, he read it to me in draft, out loud, paragraph by paragraph, for approval, and the only time we nearly came to blows was when I forced him to to leave out great chunks - pages and pages, thousands of words - about Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. If you can do it (and it’s a tough one to imitate: Frankie Howerd is so much easier), there’s money to be earned in the voice-over market as a Kenneth Williams sound-alike. I picked the Kenneth William Diaries, simply becuase by hos own admission he expresses his feelings and in turn difficulties.

Son of two retired Met police officers who avoided jail despite killing two pedestrians while drug-driving. hosted the weekly entertainment show International Cabaret and was a regular reader on the children's storytelling series Jackanory on BBC1, hosting 69 episodes. Although their relationship does not appear to have been sexual - Waine's partner was a postman, Clive Dennis - Williams is said to have been deeply in love with Tom. Its my day off tomorrow and I will be off to Ottaka's to defintely get this book I do need a good read at the mo. They were not lovers, but very close friends - and one wonders what their common interests would be?

The only drawback of publishing these diaries is that the alternative Kenneth Williamses might ruin our memory of the ‘real’ one. The coroner's court recorded a verdict of accidental death due to corrosive poisoning by carbon tetrachloride. He was in pain (‘oh, this bloody ulcer and spastic colon’), he had given up smoking (a lifelong recreation), and he was waiting to go into hospital (‘how I HATE those places’) for an operation he dreaded.Eating a mince pie saved my life - it led to my breast cancer diagnosis: 39-year-old mother tells how she. Malicious, hilarious and harrowing, The Kenneth Williams Diaries are a unique portrait of one of Britains most popular and most misunderstood performers. I loved his sharp wit, and felt pain for his constant depression, his hatred of himself and of his sexuality, his love for his mother, his pain over her death, his constant wish for death himself. Right to the very end, Williams delivers an enthralling performance and his last act is most certainly a good and well received one.