In memory of Paul O'Grady... The friend of Camilla whose alter ego warned off ... trends now
Strutting the stage in thigh-high leather boots and a fur stole the length of an anaconda, with more hair than Marie Antoinette, the queen of drag Lily Savage was a ferocious sight.
Any member of the audience who attracted her displeasure could be subject to terrifying threats — ‘Don’t make me come up there and break yer legs. Cos I’ll rip your head off and. . .’
The rest is unprintable. Her fans howled with laughter and begged for more.
Yet Lily’s creator, the comedian Paul O’Grady, who died suddenly on Tuesday aged 67, was a helplessly soft-hearted man, a devoted volunteer at Battersea Dogs Home, where he was well-known for being unable to resist adopting strays.
And before his showbiz career took off, he worked as a care officer for Camden social services in North London, providing respite for families looking after people with Alzheimer’s or mental health problems.
Lily blazed a trail as a chat-show host: before Graham Norton and Alan Carr built their careers on camp badinage with celebrities, O’Grady was interrogating stars on a tigerskin double bed for Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast.
Lily blazed a trail as a chat-show host: before Graham Norton and Alan Carr built their careers on camp badinage with celebrities, O’Grady was interrogating stars on a tigerskin double bed for Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast
He went on to front his own daytime show, after standing in for Des O’Connor – but chucked it in, claiming that he detested celebrities. Most of them, he said, were like ‘a relative you felt obliged to visit: don’t mention this, don’t mention that. Well, what are we going to talk about? The weather?’
But he was hopelessly drawn to fame as well. His closest pal was Cilla Black, and his eulogy for her at her memorial service in 2015 was both hilarious and heart-breaking.
Another close friend was Queen Consort Camilla, who took his outrageous teasing in good part. At a fundraiser in 2005 for victims of the South Asian tsunami, shortly after Charles and Camilla’s wedding, he announced: ‘It’s about time he married her – he’s been shagging her for the last 40 years.’ Luckily, neither was present.
He was such a notorious party fiend at A-lister venues that Mick Jagger revealed he had to warn the Rolling Stones lead guitarist Ronnie Wood to stop hanging out with O’Grady. There were three things that the Stones needed to avoid, Mick said: ‘Drugs, booze and Lily Savage.’
Both these wildly different sides to his personality stemmed from a working-class upbringing in Birkenhead after the war. The third of three children, he was born in 1955 when his mother Molly (whose maiden name was Savage) was in her 40s: ‘I was described as the last kick of a dying horse.’
Another close friend was Queen Consort Camilla, who took his outrageous teasing in good part
His closest pal was Cilla Black, and his eulogy for her at her memorial service in 2015 was both hilarious and heart-breaking
His father, Paddy Grady, was an Irishman who moved to Liverpool in the 1930s and joined the RAF when war broke out. A spelling mistake with his name turned him into an O’Grady, and it stuck. The family scraped together enough money to send Paul to a private Catholic primary school, ‘a waste of time because it was [run by the] Christian Brothers. All they did was talk about religion and batter us.’
He looked back on his childhood as ‘indulged and completely protected’, and surrounded by strong women. ‘They were all funny,’ he remembered in an interview last year. ‘My Auntie Chrissie was a clippy on the buses. She was very glamorous, a big blonde.
‘They were all very resilient, that was the other thing. Auntie Chrissie left the buses and got a job as a manageress of an