Sandy Wilson: 1924-2014

He celebrated the success of The Boy Friend by redecorating his kitchen and was seemingly nonchalant about the royalties that rolled in. “I’ve always appreciated a good vodka martini. Now I can afford to buy as many as I can drink.” Within three years of its first performance, the musical had made him so financially secure that he was advised he need never work again. Yet in 1964 Divorce Me Darling!, his sequel to The Boy Friend, received its premiere. It was, however, less triumphant, with the journalist Bernard Levin (who would later join The Times) calling it “relentlessly incomprehensible”.

Wilson, a stocky man often dressed immaculately in Savile Row suits, had an eccentric side. For a time he sported a droopy moustache modelled on one he had seen in a Van Gogh picture “because I thought it went rather well with a hat I had bought”. When not working he would venture abroad or swap recipes among his circle of gastronomic friends (he was a talented cook). A gay man, for decades he enjoyed a bachelor lifestyle but was later joined in his South Kensington flat by a partner, Chak Yui, who survives him.

From The Times obituary.