Freud was best known from his three decades appearing on the BBC game show “Just a Minute," in which panelists compete to see who can talk the longest without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Freud's well-stocked vocabulary and his slow, deadpan speech made him a master of the game.
“Cheek is when someone of diminished responsibility goes to the British Broadcasting Corp. and elects to be chairman of a panel game on the basis that he might have some idea of how to control people whose multisyllabic words he doesn't understand, whose meaning he is unable to comprehend," he once said during a typical delivery.
Freud had a testy relationship with his brother, the famed artist Lucian Freud, rooted in childhood suspicions that Lucian was his mother's pet.
Born in Berlin in 1924, Clement Raphael Freud immigrated to England with his family in 1933 -- “refugees from the Nazis before the habit had caught on," he said.
He knew his grandfather, who died in London in 1939, as a sickly older man with mouth cancer. “He was to me not famous, but to me a good grandfather in that he didn't forget my birthdays."
Years later, as a member of a parliamentary delegation to China, Freud noticed that a fellow legislator -- the grandson and namesake of Winston Churchill -- was always given better accommodations. “It's the only time I've been out- grandfathered," Freud remarked.
