Christopher Hewett: Movies & Box Office

Christopher George Hewett (5 April 1921 – 3 August 2001) was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned more than five decades across stage, film and television. Born in Worthing, Sussex to an army officer father and an actress mother, he made his first stage appearance at the age of seven in a Dublin production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After a brief stint in the Royal Air Force, he joined the Oxford Repertory Company and debuted on the West End in 1943, launching a professional trajectory that would see him become a recognizable character actor on Broadway and in Hollywood. His early Broadway credits included the classic musical My Fair Lady and the revival of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, while his directorial work encompassed the 1960 revue From A to Z and the 1967 off‑Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hart’s By Jupiter. Hewett’s film debut came with the crime drama Pool of London (1951), but it was his flamboyant turn as Roger DeBris in Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) that cemented his reputation for comic brilliance. He later appeared as the bureaucrat Federov in the short‑lived sitcom Ivan the Terrible and as Captain Hook opposite Sandy Duncan’s Peter Pan on Broadway. From 1983‑84 he was Lawrence, the sidekick on Fantasy Island, and his most enduring role was that of the crisp‑tongued English butler Lynn Aloysius Belvedere in the ABC series Mr. Belvedere (1985‑90). A devout Catholic and lifelong bachelor, Hewett served at St. Victor’s Church in West Hollywood and, despite suffering from arthritis and diabetes in later life, continued to make occasional television appearances until his final cameo on Ned and Stacey in 1997. He died on 3 August 2001 in Los Angeles at the age of 80, leaving a legacy of versatile performances that continue to be celebrated by theatre and television enthusiasts alike.