Home /

Young Ones star on the family secret that changed his life

By Hadley Freeman
The Times·
9 mins to read

The actor, who found fame as a clueless hippie in The Young Ones, reveals that his father was a Jew who escaped the Nazis.

Nigel Planer always knew his father was “foreign”. “He didn’t sound English, he didn’t behave English. Sports days at school were an embarrassment, he couldn’t do anything,” says the writer and actor when we meet in a pub near his home in south London.

Planer grew up in the suburb of Mortlake and, as far as

Save