He could have straddled the world; instead, he lived all his adult life in a series of apartments along the Euston and Marylebone Road

That notion of innate genius, mysterious and unearned, is at the heart of my fascination with Williams. He was brilliant, an apparently limitless talent – but his career was contained within tight boundaries. He never made millions. He did not conquer Hollywood, nor Broadway, nor Vegas. He did not make TV spectaculars or dramas or sitcoms, though he appeared to be a gift for any of them. The greatest playwrights of the age – Orton, Pinter, Bolt – created roles for him, but his theatre work is largely forgotten. He could have straddled the world; instead, he lived all his adult life in a series of apartments along the Euston and Marylebone Road, and all of the buildings can be glimpsed by taking a 205 bus from St Pancras to Paddington station.

C. Stevens, Born brilliant: the life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 51.

This may overstate the genius of Kenneth Williams, but the rest of the book is clear on the self-inflicted nature of the constraints that did define his career and his life.