A sad-faced character player of stage and screen often cast in comic or seriocomic roles, Ron Moody is best recalled for portraying Fagin, the adult leader of a pickpocket gang, in both the 1960 London stage and 1968 feature film versions of "Oliver!". He went on to play Uriah Heep in the 1970 NBC version of "David Copperfield" and Ippoli Vorobyaninov, the clerk of noble birth searching for his family fortune in "The Twelve Chairs" (1970). But Moody never seemed to land meaty roles again and his feature film and TV appearances became more sporadic in the 80s and 90s.

Moody originally studied