me pretty near". A regular visitor to the cinemas and the theatres in Hammersmith, his school report said: "We fear for his future". He left school aged 14. In an exchange with his father Perry commented, "I don't need any qualifications. I'm going to be a famous film star or a great comedian", to which his father responded with the phrase "you stupid boy". After leaving school, he was sent to Clark's college to learn shorthand, typing and bookkeeping. He truanted, spending the whole of one summer reading Tarzan books on Barnes Common, rather than attending class. He worked in his father's antique shop and the carpet department of Waring & Gillow, before training as the maker of scientific instruments and working in a factory making naval telescopes. With the outbreak of the Second World War, his family moved to Watford just outside London, his father taking over the shop of an uncle. In Watford, he served in the Home Guard, which he joined in 1940, and became involved in amateur dramatics. Delaying call up at the insistence of his mother, he joined the First (Mixed) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery at Oswestry in 1943, and the camp concert party. The following year, he was sent to Bombay in India, and then Burma, being promoted in rank from gunner to bombardier in the process. He was active in the concert party at the Deolali base of the Royal Artillery, and later in Combined Services Entertainment. Demobbed and back in the UK, he trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) on a serviceman's scholarship, where his contemporaries included Joan Collins, Lionel Jeffries and Robert Shaw. He spent his holiday period working as a Redcoat in Butlin's Holiday Camps. Initially working in repertory and West End musicals from 1950 after graduating from RADA, during the period 1956–1965, Perry was actor-manager at the Watford Palace Theatre, in coll