March 1, 2010. Copyright 2010, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Hollywood actor David Niven, the epitome of English elegance, born 100 years ago
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, March 1, Graphic News:  David Niven liked to tell people he was Scottish. He claimed his Celtic ancestry through the man he knew as his father -- William Niven -- whose people could be traced back to a village in Perthshire. Niven himself often gave his birthplace as Kirriemuir, in neighbouring Angus. And when the time came to apply to join a regiment, it was to the Scots he looked. It is ironic, then, that this tall, elegant, beautifully-spoken man is remembered, like his contemporary and some-time housemate, Errol Flynn, as the quintessential Englishman.
 
After Niven's death, 27 years ago this summer, at his chalet in Switzerland, where he had chosen to endure the last stages of the muscle-wasting motor neurone disease, it was found that his place of birth was, in fact, London and that his father, although legally Niven senior, might well have been the English Tory peer, Thomas Comyn-Platt. Niven's biographer, Michael Munn, went so far as to say that "Niv", as he was universally known, had told him as much during an interview twelve months before he died, though the actor's son and namesake, David Jr., has expressed his doubts. For Niven, the loss of his father, William, at Gallipoli in 1915, blighted his boyhood, not least because his mother went on to marry Comyn-Platt who, biological father or no, made a cold stepfather to the youngest of the four Niven children.
 
A master raconteur, with a gift for the timely quip -- such as the time a streaker ran behind him as he hosted the 1974 Oscars ceremony -- Niven survived brutality at boarding school, action in France during the Second World War and the sudden death, at 28, of his beloved first wife, Primula Rollo, the mother of his two sons. The family had only just moved to California where Niv was resuming his war-interrupted career in 1946, when "Primmie" fell down a flight of steps into a basement at the home of fellow actor Tyrone Power, during a party game of Hide and Seek, suffering fatal head injuries. The actor, who had achieved huge popularity with films like The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), The Dawn Patrol (1938) and Raffles (1939), now plunged into so severe a depression that he put a gun in his mouth and was only saved from suicide when it failed to fire.
 
Niven remarried, but the three decades he spent with Swedish model Hjordis Tersmeden, were troubled. Despite their adopting two girls -- one of whom was the acknowledged result of his affair with a young Swiss woman -- the pair were estranged, though never divorced, long before his final illness. Publicly, he remained the twinkling-eyed charmer, debonair and dashing, favoured by writer Ian Fleming to play his creation, James Bond. He seemed perfectly cast as the adventurer, Phileas Fogg, in the 1956 film, Around the World In 80 Days, as the playboy jewel thief in The Pink Panther (1963) and alongside his old friend Peter Ustinov in the lavish 1978 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile.
 
In his autobiography, The Moon's A Balloon, Niven portrayed himself as light-hearted. Asked why he always appeared so cheerful, he replied, typically:  "Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful...I feel it's my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too." The writer and barrister, John Mortimer, speaking at Niven's memorial service, described the life of the actor who had once starred in Thank you, Jeeves! (1936), as "Wodehouse with tears".
/ENDS