Five feet two inches tall, and afflicted with a lifelong limp (he had a club foot), Moore cultivated an image as "cuddly Dudley", an impish figure with a droll humour and teddy-bear appeal, alternately fawned over by tall beautiful women and the object of derision.

A musical prodigy, Moore never deserted his piano. In addition to releasing a number of jazz records and touring with his own jazz band, he played Beethoven's Triple Concerto with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and composed scores for films and the theatre.

Yet to the public at large he was known not so much for his rare musical ability, nor even for Not only . . . But Also, the wonderfully funny television programme he made with Peter Cook, but rather as the protagonist of two films which proved popular in America: 10 (1979), a randy farce in which he starred with Bo Derek, and Arthur (1981), in which he played a supposedly lovable alcoholic. Success had taken the place of achievement.

Dudley Stuart John Moore was born on April 19 1935 at Dagenham, Essex. He had an elder sister. His father, a taciturn Scot who had been born illegitimate and grown up in Glasgow orphanages, worked as an electrician for the Stratford East Railway. The musical gene came from his mother's side of the family.

Dudley was actually born with two club feet, but whereas the right one naturally corrected itself, the left became the object of endless childhood operations. At Dagenham County High School he quickly became the butt of jokes on account of his size and his limp, and sought refuge in jokes and in music, for which he displayed an extraordinary precocity. He played the piano (including jazz in the style of Erroll Garner), organ and violin; he studied at the Guildhall School of Music and won a music scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford.

Initially Moore loathed Oxford, but he gradually gained confidence and carved a niche for himself by writing music, acting for the Experimental Theatre Club, playing jazz and performing in cabaret. It was chiefly his enthusiasm for drama that led him to stay in Oxford after he had completed his degree in 1957 and to take the Bachelor of Music course in composition.

On coming down from Oxford, Moore indulged his love of jazz, playing with Johnny Dankworth and touring America with the Vic Lewis Band. In 1959 he made a record, Strictly for the Birds, with the future Beatles' producer George Martin.

Then, in 1960, John Bassett, the assistant producer of the Edinburgh Festival, who wanted to put together an Oxbridge revue, recruited him for a show to be performed at the Fringe; and Moore in turn recommended a fellow Oxford graduate, Alan Bennett. Jonathan Miller, a pathologist, and Peter Cook, who had already written the West End revue Pieces of Eight, were the Cambridge representatives on Beyond the Fringe.

The show, which combined political satire with mimicry and music, proved to be a defining moment in the history of British humour. After the Festival it ran for two years in the West End and for two further years on Broadway. Moore might have lacked the intellectual ballast of his colleagues - certainly he confessed to being overawed by them - but he provided superb musical satires, of a Beethoven sonata, and of Britten and Schubert songs - and made telling contributions to several of the sketches.

Although relations between the four performers were often strained, and Moore's enthusiasm for clowning and non-musical input was treated, in the words of Peter Cook, "with benign contempt", Cook and Moore became firm friends.

Yet Cook was always a dangerous companion, especially when he was joking. "Dudley," he observed in the flush of the show's success, "had gone from being a subservient little creep, a genial serf, to become an obstinate bastard who asserted himself".

Certainly the success of Beyond the Fringe gave a fillip to Moore's sex life. His performance on stage, Alan Bennett observed, "was often merely a perfunctory interruption of the more prolonged and energetic performance going on in his dressing room". In Britain the model Celia Hammond commanded his ardent, though by no means his exclusive, attention; in New York he succeeded in seducing the actress Tuesday Weld in a limousine on the way back from the show.

It was hardly surprising that Moore, who was also involved in writing music for stage shows, collapsed with exhaustion during the London run. He flew to Positano to recuperate, while Robin Ray temporarily took over his part in Beyond the Fringe.

At the airport Moore bumped into Sir John Gielgud, who gave him a letter of introduction to Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, who lived in Italy. During the flight, Moore looked at the note Gielgud had written. "Darling Lilli," it ran, "This will introduce you to the brilliant young pianist from Beyond the Fringe - Stanley Moon."

In New York relations between the cast became more and more fractious, and Moore fell out with Bennett when he changed some lines in a sketch. "We didn't have an argument; he did," Moore remembered, "and I don't think we have ever really spoken after that."

Moore returned from New York in 1964 to find himself much in demand. He appeared successfully on the BBC 2 music show Offbeat, and was then offered a programme to be entitled The Dudley Moore Show. He turned for help to Peter Cook, and the venture (at first planned as a one-off show, and extended into three series, in 1964, 1966 and 1970) was renamed Not Only . . . But Also.

Several programmes in the first two series have been lost, due to the BBC's extraordinary decision to scrub the film of all comedy programmes; in some cases even the scripts were destroyed. This policy was later modified to scrubbing all programmes in a series except for the first and the last.

Many of the sketches that survived, however, have become classics: Pete and Dud, cloth-capped and wearing old raincoats, recounting how they were being dogged by night calls from glamorous film stars; the leaping nuns of the Order of St Beryl; the art gallery dialogue, in which it is suggested that the sign of a good Rubens nude is "when the bottoms follow you around the room"; the bout between Gentleman Jim Cook, the Torquay stylist, and Dudley Moon, the Dagenham Dodger; and a wonderful pseudo-intellectual analysis of a blues number which comprehensively misses the point.

If these ideas were spawned in the fertile mind of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, always the more vulnerable and sympathetic character, was equally responsible for making them so funny in performance - not least by his tendency to be reduced to helpless laughter in mid-sketch. Peter Cook, by no means always magnanimous, recognised what he owed to Moore. "It was ideal; I can't imagine a comedy relationship being better. I adored Dudley."

This success of Not only . . . But Also led to offers of work in the cinema. In The Wrong Box (1966), Peter Cook and Dudley Moore played a pair of nephews after their uncle's inheritance. Although the film received generous reviews, there was disappointment that the script left them little opportunity for improvisation.

They had more scope in Bedazzled (1967), which Cook insisted on writing without Moore's help. An updating of the Faust legend, the story presented a Wimpy bar chef named Stanley Moon (Moore) who sells his soul to the devil (Cook) in return for seven chances at winning the love of a waitress (Eleanor Bron).

The next year, Moore scripted (with John Wells and Joe McGrath), composed and starred in Thirty Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia. He played a pianist who leaves home six weeks before his 30th birthday vowing to be married and to have written a musical by the big day. The film confirmed suspicions that Moore, while being a brilliant foil, was too one-dimensional to carry a film by himself.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Moore composed musical scores for a number of films, including John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence (1967). He also appeared in small parts in several other pictures, among them Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), in which he played the dormouse.

He also starred in the London stage version of Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam. Moore was an obvious choice for the role, as he shared with Allen the same put-upon screen persona and the same status as a wholly unlikely sex symbol.

While touring Australia with his jazz trio in 1971, Moore helped Peter Cook create a new satirical show which drew on their work in Beyond the Fringe. At first called Behind the Fridge, it included the celebrated sketch in which a one-legged Moore auditions for the screen role of Tarzan, only to be told by the interviewer, Cook, that he is "deficient in the leg department . . . to the tune of one leg". Retitled Good Evening, the show became the Broadway hit of the 1973/4 season and won the pair a Tony for their "unique contribution to the theatre of comedy".

In the mid-1970s Peter Cook and Dudley Moore collaborated on three "Derek and Clive" records. Recorded over the course of marathon drinking sessions, they allowed Cook and Moore to give full rein to their instinct for scatological improvisation. Moore often became a giggling wreck.

Island Records initially refused to release the recordings, fearing a backlash against the crudity. But after pirated copies sold in quantity, the company issued the first "Derek and Clive" album in 1976.

Moore's final venture with Cook was the disappointing film Hound of the Baskervilles (1977). Afterwards he moved to California, while Cook lived an increasingly reclusive and alcoholic existence in Hampstead until his death in 1994.

Moore's first Hollywood role was as a sex-obsessed loser trying to seduce Goldie Hawn to the strains of the Bee Gees in Foul Play (1978). A small part, it nevertheless brought him to the attention of the director Blake Edwards, whom he later met in psychotherapy, and who signed him for 10 (1979). The film's success owed as much to Moore's portrayal of a bumbling middle-aged composer desperately trying to attract a woman who scores 10 on his scale of 1 to 10, as to the incontestable physical charms of Bo Derek.

Though 10 made Moore a Hollywood superstar, he had difficulty throughout the 1980s in finding suitable outlets for his talents. The title of his next film, Wholly Moses! (1980) accurately reflects its lack of humour.

Arthur (1981) proved to be the apogee of Moore's Hollywood success. Starring alongside Liza Minnelli and Sir John Gielgud (who won an Oscar as the butler), Moore played a millionaire playboy who has to decide between, on the one hand, his inheritance and an arranged marriage, and, on the other, penury with a waitress (Liza Minnelli) whom he had met while she was shoplifting in Bloomingdale's. The film took $30 million at the box office within three months.

It proved to be Moore's last real success. Although he was rarely without work, the films he made during the rest of the 1980s were, at best, of uneven quality. They included Micki and Maude (1984), Santa Claus - The Movie (1985), and Crazy People (1990). Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988) was a feeble attempt to capitalise on an earlier success, and Blame It On the Bellboy (1992) a tired and tepid farce.

Meanwhile Moore had continued to tour with his jazz trio. He recorded both solo and with other artists; and he hosted two television series designed to popularise classical music: Orchestra (1991) with Sir Georg Solti, and Concerto! (1993).

For all his commercial success, there was a lingering sadness about Dudley Moore, a sense of a talent and of a man unfulfilled. His Faustian pact with Hollywood did no justice to his gifts. As to his private affairs, he held that sex was the most important part of anyone's life, and paid the price for this belief in a series of seedy liaisons alternating with unsatisfactory, sometimes violent, ventures into matrimony.

In September 1999, he announced that he had for some time been suffering from the effects of progressive supranuclear palsy, a brain disease which impaired his vision, mobility and speech, and which had, during the previous few years, led some observers unfairly to accuse him of habitual public drunkenness.

He was appointed CBE in 2001.

Dudley Moore married four times: first, in 1968 (dissolved 1972) Suzy Kendall; secondly, in 1975 (dissolved 1980) Tuesday Weld, with whom he had a son; thirdly, in 1988 (dissolved 1990) Brogan Lane; and fourthly, in 1994, Nicole Rothschild, with whom he had another son.

Between 1980 and 1988 he lived with Susan Anton, a former Miss America who was 11 in taller than he.

Published March 28 2002

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