Obituaries
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Classics scholar who helped build a nation Palestine where a love for the Arab world William Duff William Robert ‘Bill’ began. It was also there that he met his 1922-2014 Duff, whom the Financial Polish wife Irenka. Times called “the last official link between the Gulf’s colonial After returning to Oxford to study Arabic, era and its commercially dynamic Duff was then posted to Kuwait with Bank present” passed away of natural causes in of Iran and the Middle East, a forerunner Dubai on 14 February. He was a financial of HSBC. After Duff was appointed as the expert who served Dubai’s previous ruler, financial adviser to Sheikh Rashid in 1960, His Highness Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al he designed and built the financial Maktoum, during the early years of the architecture that channelled two decades of emirate. Duff devoted his life to Dubai oil revenues into infrastructural and played a bigger part than any other development, from electricity and water to westerner in the early transformation of ports, airports and hotels. the emirate from obscure outpost into global hub. Among his many Duff: nation builder Gerald Lawless, President and Group CEO contributions Duff set up the Dubai of Jumeirah Group, said Duff was an example to all. “All I can Department of Finance and Dubai Customs. He was a say is that he was a real gentleman, a great example of the founder member of the Seamens Mission and also expatriates who lived in Dubai and contributed to this nation. instrumental in the establishment of Dubai Ports World and He loved Dubai. His generation contributed so much and was a Jebel Ali Free Zone. big part of the fabric of Dubai for so long,” Lawless said. Duff also established the first British curriculum kindergarten, Unlike other expatriates such as Sir Maurice Flanagan, Emirates primary and secondary school, the Dubai English Speaking Airline’s founding chief executive, Duff went unhonoured by the School. Furthermore, he was the founding member of the British government, despite decades of promoting UK-Dubai ties. Christian Cemetery Committee and the Dubai Electricity Co, which is now the Dubai Water and Electricity Authority. But Duff, who is survived by Irenka, daughters Diana and Sheila and four grandchildren, never regretted his life as a civil servant. Born in Singapore on 13 May 1922, Bill Duff attended As he told his family: “It is not about the money. How many Cheltenham College before reading classics at Oxford. After people get to help build a country?” World War II interrupted his studies, his soldiering ended in
The troubled genius who invented the TV sketch show numbers. He rose to prominence in the Admiral Einstein invited him to tea. Broadway Revue in 1949, opposite the Hitchcock called him the diminutive Imogene Coca. During intensive greatest comic since Charlie meetings, his gag-men, who also included Chaplin. In his 1950s heyday, he fronted TV Woody Allen and Neil Simon, would face him programmes – Your Show of Shows, Caesar’s in a semi-circle. It was a little like “the Sun King Hour – attracting some 60 million viewers. Yet and his courtiers”, as Simon recalled. like so many brilliant comedians, Sid Caesar was punished by “a law of negative Caesar made the most of their material. In one compensation”, said Dick Cavett in The New of his best sketches, he conjures hilarity from York Times. Offstage, he seemed diminished – the simple premise of a German general being tormented by self-doubt, prone to rages. dressed by an agile valet (Howard Morris). In “Without a character to hide behind, Sid was another, he plays a reluctant guest on a This is lost,” Larry Gelbart, one of his remarkable Your Life-style TV show, who soon collapses stable of writers, observed. As his star waned, into helpless sobbing. “It was fun, but hard,” Caesar fell prey to drug and alcohol addiction. Caesar confessed of his glory years. There were months in the 1970s when he never got out of bed, except to phone for beer His colleagues knew the great man lost his when his wife’s back was turned. Once, he Caesar: the world’s strongest comic temper (there was the time he asked a cabbie if was astonished to learn he had recently made he recalled what it was like to be born, before a film in Australia. His only memories of the attempting to drag him out of his cab through the window), but trip were of getting on the outward flight and a particularly few realised how much Caesar was drinking, said The Daily beautiful sunset. Telegraph. When his show was axed in the late 1950s, the comic, aged 36, disappeared into what he called his 20-year blackout. Caesar, who has died aged 91, was born in Yonkers, New York, where his Jewish parents ran a 24-hour diner. Young Sid never understood the babble of languages spoken by the clientele, but he Sightings were rare, and usually sponsored by his alumni. Simon wrote a one-man show for him in the 1960s; in the did develop an uncanny ability to imitate them, honing the 1970s he appeared in Brooks’s Silent Movie (and also in a “double-talk” (fluent gibberish that sounded foreign) that became cameo in Grease, as Coach Calhoun). In the 1980s he sobered a staple of his act. Not gifted academically, he was shy and short up with the help of a self-created form of therapy. Every day he as a boy but eventually grew to a strapping 6ft 2in, his physique recorded improvised dialogues between “Sid”, the wise paternal consolidated by weightlifting. Mel Brooks, another of his writers, remarked that his boss wasn’t only the world’s funniest comedian, version of himself, and “Sidney”, his unruly infantile side. “Everybody wants to have a goal,” he once reflected. “Then he was also the strongest. you get to that goal, and then you gotta get to another goal. But in between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived Caesar started his professional career playing the saxophone, but and enjoyed. it soon became clear his real talent was for the patter between Sid Caesar 1922-2014
09 March 2014 THE WEEK