Bob Hope

Bob Hope, who has died aged 100, has been so much part of the bloodstream of American showbusiness for so long that if there was a Mount Rushmore for comedians he would be among the first to be sculptured, with his celebrated retroussé nose forming a ski jump. Nor would it be inappropriate since Hope, whom Time Magazine once called "an American folk figure", was on intimate terms with every American president since Harry Truman, at all of whom he directed inoffensive gibes.

For many people under 50, Bob Hope's immense status in the English-speaking world might seem perplexing given the inferior qualify of many of his films, his reputation as a comic reliant on an army of gag-writers and, since the 1970s, as an old man out of touch with rapidly changing mores. Yet the main answer lies in the nostalgia inherent in Hope's signature tune, Thanks For The Memory.

During the war years, his snappy, escapist films brought joy to audiences on the home front, while he was the only Hope (puns on his surname have always been de rigueur) for thousands of troops overseas whom he entertained on his various tours from 1941. Those growing up in the gloomy postwar period remember his films with glee, especially the three My Favourite ... (Blonde ... Brunette ... Spy) movies, and his six Road pictures, with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. As Woody Allen, on whom Hope was plainly a potent influence, has said: "If I wanted a weekend of pure pleasure, it would be to have a half dozen Bob Hope films and watch them. He is a great, great talent, a guy who has been able to combine a thin story with great jokes." But the jokes need Hope's superb timing to bring them to life.

Leslie Townes Hope was born at 44 Craighton Road, Eltham, London SE9, the fifth of the seven sons of an unsuccessful master stonemason, who took his family to the USA when Bob was five years old. He was brought up in a tough neighbourhood of Cleveland, where he learned to defend himself both physically and verbally. Hope, who claimed to have inherited his sense of humour from his paternal grandfather from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, started performing at an early age, singing and tap dancing, and winning a Charlie Chaplin imitation competition. Of his lack of much formal education, Hope once commented: "I didn't get to college until I played a Harvard man in Son of Paleface."

He began his professional career in 1920 in a show headed by "Fatty" Arbuckle in Cleveland, before teaming up with another performer for a "blackface" act which toured in vaudeville. This period is often evoked in the films in which he played an overweening ham in fifth-rate shows. In My Favourite Blonde (1942) he's a vaudevillian being upstaged by Percy the Performing Penguin. When he is asked in the haunted house comedy-thriller, The Cat and the Canary (1939) if big, empty houses scare him, Hope replies: "Not me. I was in vaudeville."

After going solo, Hope landed the role of Huckleberry Haines in Jerome Kern's Roberta - the part played by Fred Astaire in the film version. In 1932, during the run of the musical on Broadway, he met and married Dolores Read, a nightclub singer, with whom he remained all his life and they adopted four children. Other stage successes followed: Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue, with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman, and the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, in which he sang "I can't get started with you" to chorus girl, Eve Arden. In these shows, he was able to hone his topical ad-fib technique, while proving himself no mean singer (he had a lilting tenor voice) and hoofer.

But it was on the Pepsodent radio shows, which started in 1938, that the "Bob Hope character" was, born - craven, conceited (he would purr at himself in the mirror), credulous buffoon, prepared to double cross anybody, man or woman, to save his own skin. Contemptible as he usually was - seldom courting sympathy - audiences responded to him because they recognised the worst in themselves.

Although Hope had made a number of two-reelers for Warner Bros, shot in New York, he made his feature film debut in The Big Broadcast of 1938 for Paramount, the studio where he remained for 15 years. As an MC on board a luxury liner, he got to sing the wistful Leo Robin-Ralph Rainger Oscar-winning song, Thanks for the Memory, with Shirley Ross. In order to cash in on the hit song, Paramount immediately teamed Hope up with Ross again in Thanks for the Memory in which they sang another superb duet, Two Sleepy People, written by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser. But it was in The Cat and The Canary that Hope was first able to give the impression of ad-libbing in front of the camera, and in which he had to cope with a heroine (Paulette Goddard) who is smarter and stronger than himself, a role reversal situation that continued throughout most of his films.

In 1940, Paramount cast Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour together for a one-off musical comedy called Road to Singapore. It was such a smash that it led to six further Road pictures (if one counts the dismal made-in-England Road to Hong Kong in 1962). The trio would take the Road to Zanzibar (1941), Morocco (1942), Utopia (1946), Rio (1948) and Bali (1953) although they hardly ever strayed from the studio backlot.

The appeal of the films lay in the surreal in-jokes, the freewheeling screenplays, and the friend-foe banter between Hope and Crosby, vying for the affections of Lamour as they struggled to extricate themselves from perilous circumstances in exotic locations. Inevitably, Crosby got the girl. Even in the Princess and the Pirate (1944), on loan out to Sam Goldwyn, Hope loses Virginia Mayo to Crosby, who appears in a cameo for a few seconds at the end. "How do you like that! I knock myself out for nine reels and some bit player from Paramount comes over and gets the girl. That's the last film I do for Goldwyn." This type of aside to the audience, and his recognition of being in a movie, was a routine that Hope almost made his own.

He continued in the same wisecracking vein opposite Jane Russell in two spoof Westerns, The Paleface (1948), in which he was a correspondence-school dentist, and Son of Paleface (1952) where, having caused derision among cowboys in a saloon by ordering milk, he quickly adds "in a dirty glass". In another picture, when told in court that "anything you say might be held against you", Hope replies, "Jane Russell".

Gradually, Hope took on more rounded serio-comic roles, such as the two Damon Runyon characters, Sorrowful Jones (1949) and The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and in the biopics, The Seven Little Foys (1954), based on the life of vaudevillian Eddie Foy - the highlight being a vigorous dance routine with James Cagney - and Beau James (1957) about Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant mayor of New York in the 1920s.

The Facts of Life (1960), which dealt with Hope and Lucille Ball carrying on an unconsummated adulterous affair, began a string of feeble sex comedies, futile attempts to participate in the "permissive society" and offering sad evidence of the comedian's decline on screen. He was more comfortable in the blander regions of television, and making innumerable personal appearances at presidential functions.

Hope hosted the Oscar ceremonies 22 times. Although he himself was presented with six honorary Academy awards, he never got one for a performance. "Welcome to the Academy awards," he said at one gala, "or, as it is known in my house - Passover." Marlon Brando once commented: "Bob Hope would go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, provided they have a camera and three people there ... He's an applause junkie."

Applause apart, Hope gave generously to many organisations, including £60,000 to a theatre in Eltham now named the Bob Hope theatre, and he was frequently seen on the golf course at the various Bob Hope Charity Pro-Am tournaments in the USA and in England.

Hope became one of the richest entertainers in the world. His wealth started to grow when he became an independent producer on My Favourite Brunette in 1947. The Hope empire extended into oil fields, baseball teams, TV stations, and thousands of acres of land in the San Fernando valley and Palm Springs.

Bob Hope continued to be the most active and widely- travelled entertainer of US troops abroad, having played to thousands of soldiers in Europe and the Pacific during the second world war, and in Korea where he toured military hospitals. But when he visited Vietnam he found himself out of touch with the pot-smoking troops, many of them black, who heckled him and held up placards reading "Peace Not Hope". For once his chirpy personality became rattled. Hope, who supported the bombing of Hanoi, failed to comprehend why he had suddenly lost the widespread devotion that had hitherto been bestowed on him by the common soldier.

They had always enjoyed his ribbing of the brass, his way of overcoming the baddies in his films, despite his cowardice, and the beautiful women he pursued, some of them in real life. Yet one must inevitably acknowledge the pleasure he had given audiences for over half a century.

· Bob Hope, comedian, born May 29 1903, died July 28 2003