Jon Pertwee
1919-1996|
Biography
Born in Chelsea, London, England 
Jon Pertwee Quotes
“Charles Laughton, the famous actor, said to me ‘I understand you were thrown out of RADA.’ I said ‘Yes’ and he said ‘you’re bound to do well, so was I.’”“I hate working in studios. That’s why I adored doing Worzel Gummidge, because we shot the whole thing on film. We were outside all the time.” “American fans are fanatics. They come dressed up in all the gear. Not so much mine, because mine’s too expensive, with my velvet jacket and frilly shirt. There were masses of these conferences.” “I cried a great deal [on my last day filming Doctor Who]. I’m very emotional. I was very upset about it. I had a good sob.” “I decided to leave [Doctor Who] because Roger [Delgado] had died, Barry Letts was leaving, Terrance Dicks was leaving. I thought it looked like the end of an era and I thought, well, I may as well go. Shaun Sutton, the head of programmes, said ‘Would you like to stay on and do another season?’ And I said ‘yeah, yeah, I’ll do one more if you pay me a bit of extra money.’ He said ‘like what?’ I told him and they said ‘We’re sorry to see you go.’” “I knew I wanted him to be a figure that the children believed in, that knew they had enough faith in the Doctor to say, ‘The Doctor will do it, he’ll look after us, and we’ll be all right under his wings.’ That’s what I was very determined to do, to make him straight and utterly believable.” “I saw the Doctor as an interplanetary crusader and it was this dashing Pied Piper image that appealed to me. I could spread my cloak, take the Earth under my wing and say, ‘It’s all right now...I’ll deal with this.’” “I think that I felt that the companion should traditionally be strapped to a railway line, saying: ‘Help, help.’ But Liz [Shaw] was too strong for that, she was too intelligent for that.” “I was delighted to appear in The Five Doctors and I thought it was a great shame that Tom [Baker] declined to take part. Of course, it would have been nicer to have had a bit more to do, but that was necessarily a problem, considering the amount of characters Terrance Dicks was trying to cram in. Generally, I thought I was done justice, and I told John Nathan-Turner then that I wouldn’t mind coming back to do the odd special occasionally.” “I was very fond of the Ogrons, who were wonderful, because they were so big, even I was terrified of them.” “If you talk to Katy, she would say, ‘I’ve got bowlegs, I’m flat-chested, and my hair goes straight in the wind, and I can’t see, I’m blind,’ and yet here was this astonishingly attractive woman that the whole of the country was going: ‘Cor, isn’t she gorgeous.’” “In my opinion, Caroline John didn’t fit into Doctor Who. I couldn’t really believe in her as a sidekick to the Doctor, because she was so darned intelligent herself. The Doctor didn’t want a know-it-all by his side, he wanted someone who was busy learning about the world. Although Caroline and I worked well together, I don’t think it did the series any harm when she left.” “It never occurred to me that I could ever be remotely considered for the part of the Doctor. When Tenniel Evans, with whom I was playing in The Navy Lark, suggested I put myself up for the part, I thought it was an absurd idea. I was widely known as a radio and stage comedy actor and they would never take the suggestion seriously.” “Jo was different. Katy Manning was a lunatic. She was irrepressible, she was terribly funny. She had moments of brilliance and moments of awfulness, but she had a sort of magic.” “My great theory is that you get a lot more work done out of actors if you can make them laugh. Our producer at the time used to get rather cross with me and used to say things like, ‘I do think you ought to take your work a little bit more seriously.’ I said, ‘Look, are you unhappy about the results you are getting from us?’ He said, ‘No, not really.’ I said, ‘Well, are we over-running?’ He said, ‘No’. I said, ‘Well, what are you complaining about?’ He said, ‘I just feel your attitude is very light-hearted.’ I said. ‘It is, and that way you get a lot more work done.’” “Nobody knows more about Doctor Who than Barry [Letts] did - does.” “Roger Delgado was the bravest man I ever knew because he was basically a coward. He was just a naturally very, very nervous man. He was frightened of his own shadow. Look at that face. It terrified the Bejesus out of anybody.” “There’s nothing more alarming than coming home and finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec.” “Tom Baker says he’s the Doctor. You can’t argue with Tom on that one, he did seven years and he always wins the polls.” “When I did the first one [Spearhead From Space], I look at it with horror now, because I hated it. I didn’t like all that sequence of looking in the mirror and trying on funny hats and being photographed in the shower-bath with a shower hat on. I wasn’t too keen on the escape in the wheelchair either. And of course having seen that, I thought we mustn’t do that any more.” “When my agent approached the BBC [for the part of Dr Who] and that long silence on the phone was over we were told that I was on their short list and had been ever since they wanted a replacement for Patrick Troughton.” “When threats came and the Daleks went over Westminster Bridge and the then monsters came out of the Morden underground, the pterodactyls, brontosauruses and things, that to me is much more alarming than if you go up into some obscure planet of rubber trees and do it.” “[On The Daemons: ] I liked it particularly because it was atmosphere. Apart from Bok, a lovely little gargoyle figure, and the big satyr at the end, there were no monsters. It was atmosphere. One of the most alarming scenes was when Katy [Manning] ran down past the church and was enveloped in a bush that came out and grabbed her. Up in the barrows, wonderfully atmospheric they were at night. Apart from the great moment when Katy was running behind me, tripped over a barbed wire entanglement and her knickers fell off.” “[On the Radio Series in the 1990s:] The first one, ‘Paradise of Death’, had the most extraordinary results. It got into the charts. It amazed me. I didn’t know you could get audios into charts... I think we should be doing four or five a year. I cannot understand why people are so reticent. They know it’s a big seller. We can churn this stuff out very quickly.” “[On the lost episodes:] They were surprised when they’d thrown away half of them. ‘We shouldn’t have done that because we can sell these. Get them back.’ You’d have a programme of six episodes and three they’d destroyed and three they’d kept. That’s clever. Mine, Pat Troughton’s, most of Bill Hartnell’s. They’ve all gone. Terrible, they’ve destroyed them all... They found some in a Mormon temple in Africa.” “[Roger Delgado, aka The Master] was an extraordinary man. He had these incredible eyes that put the fear of God up everybody, and that funny little ratty face and beard, and of course it was ridiculous, because he was the most gentle man that ever existed. He wasn’t a fierce man at all. He loved carpet slippers and a bottle of brandy.” “I’m not a great horror film buff. I’ve enjoyed acting in them because you can send them up. I saw Psycho in the cinema, and what made me jump like hell was when that figure appeared at the top of the stairs, because it came as a complete shock. Actually, I can remember the most frightening film: it was Repulsion by Roman Polanski.” “My father vas a great inspiration to me, because he was the best raconteur I’ve ever known in my life. He used to paralyse me with laughter.” “Eddie Gray once said to me, ‘Don’t worry my son, take my advice, say the lines, take the money and go and buy something nice’, which is the best advice I’d ever heard in my life.” “I like the best of everything.” “My real name is Jean de Pertwee de Laillevault, because I’m of a French family.” “I was in the navy, mainly because I preferred to go into action in a hammock rather than mud.” “I’m happiest on water. In it, on it or under it. I’m a Cancerian, a water sign, which probably explains it.” “I remember going up to George Bernard Shaw walking along the road and saying, ‘Good morning, Mr Shaw,’ and him replying, ‘It isn’t.’” |
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The Actor
Jon Pertwee has appeared in the following films:A Yank at Oxford (1938) The Four Just Men (1939) Trouble in the Air (1948) A Piece of Cake (1948) William Comes to Town (1948) Murder at the Windmill (1949) Helter Skelter (1949) Dear Mr. Prohack (1949) The Body Said No! (1950) Miss Pilgrim’s Progress (1950) Mister Drake’s Duck (1951) Will Any Gentleman...? (1953) The Gay Dog (1954) A Yank in Ermine (1955) It’s a Wonderful World (1956) The Ugly Duckling (1959) Just Joe (1960) Not a Hope in Hell (1960) Nearly a Nasty Accident (1961) Ladies Who Do (1963) Carry on Cleo (1964) I’ve Gotta Horse (1965) Runaway Railway (1965) You Must Be Joking! (1965) Carry on Cowboy (1966) Carry on Screaming! (1966) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) Up in the Air (1969) The House That Dripped Blood (1971) One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) Wombling Free (1977) Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977) The Water Babies (1978) The Boys in Blue (1982) Carry on Columbus (1992) Cloud Cuckoo (1994) |
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