‘She was a fan’: How the Queen backed Wallace & Gromit creator
Source: Wallace & Gromit
British animator Nick Park has revealed the late Queen was a fan of his popular claymation series Wallace & Gromit and backed him when he found himself at odds with Hollywood studio bosses.
Park, a four-time Oscar winner who also has seven BAFTAs under his belt, introduced cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his loyal canine companion to the world in 1989 with the short film A Grand Day Out.
The Aardman Animations franchise has gone on to release three more short films, two acclaimed feature films, and a string of spin-offs and TV series – most of which have featured British actor Peter Sallis providing Wallace’s unique voice.
Sallis, who starred in the long-running Yorkshire-based sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, originally came on board as a favour to help out Park with the first film, which the animator had started on while he was a student at the National Film and Television School.
But when US studio DreamWorks was co-producing the first Wallace & Gromit movie, 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it had concerns about the octogenarian actor’s age, Park told UK newspaper The Telegraph this month.
“To be honest, they probably would have replaced Peter Sallis actually, because they thought, ‘Oh, he’s 80-something, how’s this going to appeal to kids?’.”
Park didn’t back down, and said that Queen Elizabeth II – whom he sat next to at a lunch the year she turned 80 – endorsed his stance.
“She was a fan,” he told the newspaper.
“It was like chatting with my mum. I remember then talking about Peter Sallis, actually, and how DreamWorks said, ‘Maybe we ought to rethink’. And I remember her saying, ‘You ought to hang on to him!’.”
As it turned out, he did. Sallis continued voicing Wallace with his distinct northern English accent until ill health forced him to retire in 2010, the same year Last of the Summer Wine aired its final episode (he died seven years later at the age of 96).
Since then, actor Ben Whitehead has taken over as Wallace, including for the most recent film, 2024’s Vengeance Most Foul. It was produced by Aardman alone after it ended a five-year partnership with DreamWorks in 2007.
Park – whose latest interview coincides with the release in the UK this week of a book in which the famously mute Gromit finally finds his voice – has spoken previously about how US executives wanted to “Americanise” the innately British series.
He told The Telegraph that one of them even wanted to swap Wallace and Gromit’s classic Austin A35 for “a cool American pickup truck?”.
There was also discussion over a line in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit – “Look at my wife’s brassicas… ravaged in the night!” – which was uttered when a monster rabbit destroyed cauliflowers in a vegetable garden.
“The audience reaction was, ‘We don’t know what it means, but it sounds rude’, so they asked us to change it. But we didn’t.”
Fans of Park’s work (he also created the much-loved TV series Creature Comforts) will be pleased to hear that he says he has a couple of new ideas in the pipeline that he’s pitched to Aardman.
Meanwhile, Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit (as told to Nick Park) is scheduled to land on book shelves in Australia at the end of November, with publisher Penguin promising it will tell the story of “the world’s most intelligent and well-read dog”:
“And I really do know where all the bones are buried,” Gromit says. “So. I guess it’s time I spoke.”
The audiobook version of Gromit’s story will be narrated by English actor Martin Freeman – and not with a northern accent.
