From boyhood, influenced by his French step-grandfather, he had admired Napoleon and wanted to be a soldier; but he was gangling, thin and unstudious, and managed to join the army only at the third attempt.
A rare survivor of the deadly "flux", Margaret teams up with Franklin, a decent, gangling emigrant from a western state, and heads for the Atlantic.
The film pays credit where it's due: Meek's achievements owed much to his long-suffering musicians, including a future guitarist of Deep Purple; half of Chas and Dave (played by an affably gangling Ralf Little); and bullishly no-nonsense drummer Clem Cattini (James Corden, presumably filmed before overexposure did for him, and all the more likeable for it).
And certainly learners should be encouraged to think of the plays as performance texts, to act them if they have a bent for doing so, and to see first-rate performances, whether given by RSC actors or by gangling schoolboys such as Germaine Greer witnessed playing Hamlet in Australia.
Meanwhile the models on our catwalks are, or pretend to be, gangling adolescents.
The bespectacled, gangling comic genius died in 1984.
After early success with his own radio programme, Fo collaborated on a satirical revue, Il Dito nell'Occhio (Finger in the Eye), for which the mime Jacques Lecoq coached him, teaching him in particular how to make good use of his gangling arms and legs.
Led by gangling music über-geek Tim Rogers, the band's reputation was initially based around frenetic and sweaty live shows, one of which caught the attention of visiting Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, who flew them to Minnesota to record their debut album.
"But he graduates from hunched-over, gangling gormlessness to experimental swagger with an amusing and touching finesse".
This was his first grand prix as a team owner and, contrary to popular expectation, the gangling, bespectacled founder of Simtek Research had not fallen flat on his smiling face.
Tall, fresh-faced and gangling, he has (it must be said) something of the wary good manners of a young princeling, as he admires voters' pets or talks of his top-notch grades from the National Rifle Association.
