Life as a bit of a carry on

His name may not spring instantly to mind but, if you've ever seen a Carry On film, you'll never forget the face or the figure. Charles Hawtrey is the stick-limbed, bespectacled weed, the puny one who always gets cast in ridiculously gung-ho roles. He's Tonka the Great, King of Lovers, Father of Countless in Carry On Up the Jungle; he's a winsome Private Widdle who loses his woollen underpants to the Khasi of Kalabar in Carry On Up the Kyber or he's raw recruit Golightly, a tiger when it comes to bayonet practice in Carry On Jack. He is the middle-aged man-child with the lecherous cackle, whose pluck and gaiety marked him out as a Carry On institution. In short, Charles Hawtrey was a one off.

Such a phenomenon deserves proper recognition and - although it's a bit late in the day as he died more than a decade ago - the laurels have now at last landed on Hawtrey's bespectacled brow in the form of Roger Lewis's small but perfectly formed biography. For, like its subject, Lewis's book may be slim but it packs a surprising amount between its covers.

On both stage and screen, Hawtrey never got his name above the title. In fact, he was usually stuck way down the cast list. But Lewis, with wonderfully written devotion, faithfully follows the connections, the fellow-players, however tenuous they may be, and then uses them, whether fellow Italia Conti student Noel Coward or his Carry On colleague Kenneth Williams, to compare, contrast and counterpoint the strengths, quirks and specialities of Charlie Hawtrey.

Like Coward, Hawtrey is "irresistibly bright and clipped" but Lewis's comic hero ventures beyond into "a forthright epicene realm all his own". Or he may be outrageously camp like Kenneth Williams but, unlike his "spiky, nervy, brittle" Carry On compadre, Hawtrey "with his little skips and trips, and in his insect grace, is benign". But Lewis doesn't just compare. He evokes Hawtrey with his "body as bony as a tree in December, his bony witch's fingers, his round spectacles, his skin which was like tracing paper; his coal-black lock of hair".

Despite making millions for its producer, Peter Rogers, the Carry On cast was paid a pittance - usually a flat fee year-in, year-out of £5,000 per film - so Hawtrey never lived the life of a star. He had to use public transport to get to work - although he was once given a lift to Pinewood by Laurence Olivier - and after the wrap party for Carry On Don't Lose Your Head, Kenneth Williams recalled that Hawtrey surreptitiously asked the waitresses for a doggy bag. But Lewis also suggests that Hawtrey didn't help his own cause. Asked, for instance, to put his arms around Barbara Windsor for the cameras at a press reception, Hawtrey ran quivering from the room, crying out, "No thank you. Find me a gentleman instead."

But Hawtrey was usually a lot cruder about his sexual tastes. "Come on and give it to me, big boy" was just the preliminary to a typical seduction.

But even in the later years, when Hawtrey demanded better billing and flounced off the Carry On team after being refused it, Lewis treats the increasingly pathetic moments of Hawtrey's life with sympathy and even manages to find the funny bone in the most appalling situations. At the end, there he lay, the crabby old alcoholic actor who, when he was asked for an autograph by a nurse, threw a vase at her and told her to "piss off ". When the doctors tell him that if he is to live, his arteries are so withered that his legs will have to be cut off, Lewis cannot resist commenting that "Hawtrey had been legless enough in his life not to want to go the whole hog." Then, as Barbara Windsor recalls, "He lit a fag and said, 'No - I want to die with my boots on.'" And that is exactly what he did, both living and dying on his own idiosyncratic terms.