Les Dawson

Les Dawson (2 February 1931 – 10 June 1993) was a popular English comedian, remembered for his deadpan style, curmudgeonly persona and jokes about his mother-in-law and wife.Raised in the Collyhurst district of Manchester, Dawson began his entertainment career as a pianist in a Parisian brothel (according to his entertaining but factually unreliable autobiography). As a club pianist ("I finally heard some applause from a bald man and said 'thank you for clapping me' and he said 'I'm not clapping - I'm slapping me head to keep awake'"), he was to find that he got laughs by playing wrong notes and complaining to the audience. He made his television debut on the talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1967 and became a prominent comic on British television for the rest of his life.Dawson wrote many novels but was always regarded solely as an entertainer in the public imagination, and this saddened him. He told his second wife, Tracey, "Always remind them - I was a writer too".Having broken his jaw in a boxing match, Dawson was able to pull grotesque faces by pulling his jaw over his upper lip. This incident is described in the first volume of Dawson's autobiography A Clown Too Many.