Watch Mr Frick in action

Werner Groebli was undoubtedly one of the most famous ice-skating comedians of all time. But to his many fans the name will mean nothing. They knew him as Frick — from the ice-skating partnership Frick and Frack — a skater with an outstanding ability to combine complex skills with zany and contorted body positions that often had audiences in stitches.

Believed to be the highest-paid figure skater of the 1940s and 1950s, Groebli, who is credited with making 15,000 appearances in the American show Ice Follies, invented the cantilever move — feet spread-eagled pointing in opposite directions, knees bent, with his body bent backwards parallel to the ice — and would burst through the curtain in this position while taking his final bow. He also appeared in two B-movies; Lady Let’s Dance and Silver Skates in the 1940s.

Werner Fritz Groebli was born in 1915 in Basle, Switzerland. He lived next door to a boy called Hansruedi Mauch, with whom he developed a love of ice skating, and each winter the two youngsters shared a pair of skates. But despite winning the Swiss junior skating championship in 1934, Groebli generated more attention by playing the fool with Mauch, ridiculing other skaters. And although the two men went on to find fame, comedy skating was not the career that their parents had in mind for them. “I was to follow a career in architecture, and Frack’s parents wanted him to be a banker,” Groebli said. The names Frick and Frack were adopted so as not to embarrass their families.

When the duo began performing in the 1930s they aimed to make fun of what they called the pomposity of professional skaters. Dressed in traditional Alpine clothing, they incorporated spoofs of ballet and other dance styles in their act. By 1936 the humorous and often daring routines had made Frick and Frack famous, and a British producer signed them for a show in London. Two years later they went to the United States as part of the St Moritz Express Ice Revue, performing some of the time at the open-air Tropical Ice Gardens in Westwood, Los Angeles, for $200 a week. In 1939 they joined the original Ice Follies show, in which Groebli prevented the other skaters from performing his cantilever move by having written into his contract that he alone would do it.

Known as the Clown Kings of the Ice, Frick and Frack were also praised for their grace, comic timing and daring acrobatics. Rather than depending on falls or costumes to get laughs, the duo were celebrated for taking the traditional elements of figure skating and distorting them into amazing feats that left audiences enthralled. In addition to Groebli’s cantilever move he also performed an amusing toy soldier routine with stiff, robotic skating, while Frack was known for a rocking-chair spread-eagle, in which he would glide around in circles in a sitting position. Together, Frick and Frack would skate past each other, miss a handshake, hook their legs, recoil and turn back face to face. Other crowd favourites involved Frack throwing Frick an invisible rope and then he would slowly glide forward as though being pulled, and a sketch known as the Minger, which Groebli said they named after a Swiss politician called Rudolf Minger, who was also a farmer. The duo would skate as though sitting on a bouncing tractor seat.

After Mauch retired in 1954 because of a debilitating bone condition (he died in 1979), Groebli continued to perform under the name Mr Frick. Known as a consummate professional who took his work seriously, he even used to bang his head against his dressing-room wall to toughen up. “It got me in the fighting spirit,” he told an interviewer. “It works you up for the act.”

An accident forced Groebli to retire in 1980 at 65. Known as a shrewd property investor, he spent time between his homes in Zurich and Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the US. He was inducted into the US Figure Skating Association Hall of Fame in 1984.

Werner Groebli, ice skating comedian, was born on April 21, 1915. He died on April 14, 2008, aged 92