When worlds collide

[shewhomust]

Still among the obituaries, I was reading what the Guardian had to say about Peter Wyngarde...

I don't feel anything personal about this one; it may be that I think of Wyngarde as, if not actually fictitious, very definitely interstitial. I had only the vaguest recollection of his appearance in The Avengers, when John Byrne and Chris Claremont borrowed his name and his appearance to flesh out the X-Men villain, Mastermind (and here's another picture to demonstrate the point).

The Guardian obituary, though, drops him into a completely different narrative:

He insisted that he had been born Peter Paul Wyngarde in 1933. However, JG Ballard, who had endured the Japanese internment camp Lunghua with him, stated in his 2008 memoir Miracles of Life that "Cyril Goldbert, the future Peter Wyngarde, .. was four years older than me"; Ballard had been born in 1930.

Comments

[sovay]

I don't feel anything personal about this one; it may be that I think of Wyngarde as, if not actually fictitious, very definitely interstitial.

I was introduced to him with The Innocents (1961) and then Night of the Eagle (1962), so I thought of him as a real person who acted, but you are making a compelling case for his fictionality.

[shewhomust]

Oh, now you mention The Innocents, it rings a bell: it's The Turn of the Screw, isn't it?

[sovay]

Oh, now you mention The Innocents, it rings a bell: it's The Turn of the Screw, isn't it?

It is, and a very good version. Black and white, stars Deborah Kerr, does amazing ghosts with understatement and sound.