Michael Crawford

This red-haired boy soprano and child actor on radio in the 1940s and early 50s became a gawky, gangly romantic lead with an eager, ingenuous charm in British film comedies of the 60s and 70s. Crawford starred in two children's films in the mid-50s, before essaying his first teenage lead in the comedy "Two Left Feet" (1963), as an awkward young man who attempts to seduce a waitress. He followed with a series of charming performances as clumsy, callow young men learning about love in the Richard Lester comedies "The Knack . . . and How to Get It" (1966) and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1966). As Barnaby Tucker, he was tutored in romance by matchmaker Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) in the splashy musical "Hello, Dolly!" (1969) and reteamed with Richard Lester to star as an inept British Army officer, who inadvertently kills off all of the members of his unit one by one, in "How I Won the War" (1967).

After starring in the lackluster Olympics film "The Games" and the abysmal love triangle story "Hello-Goodbye" (both 1970), Crawford concentrated on British TV and the London stage where he made a name for himself in the sex farce "No Sex Please, We're British" (1971), the short-lived musicals "Billy" (based on "Billy Liar") and "Flowers for Algernon" (based on the novel of the same name that was the basis of the 1968 feature "Charly"). His energetic, exuberant performance in the boisterous Cy Coleman musical "Barnum" (1981 in London; filmed for the BBC and later aired on PBS in the US) transformed Crawford into a popular musical theater star. His sensitive, archly-romantic portrayal of the tormented, masked antihero of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical "The Phantom of the Opera" (1987 in London; 1988 on Broadway) turned him into a musical theater superstar and latter-day matinee idol.