Tom Baker - biography

“Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it’s fantastic.  It’s a kind of madness really.”

“Naturalism isn’t my strong point.  I’m not even good at coming through doors convincingly!”

“We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it’s a sad story, as if we didn’t know it’s a sad story.  There isn’t a single cool newsreader.”

“I think quite often a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people.”

“Bob Holmes, the script editor, did laugh and filled his pipe so that he could create a smoke screen between us while he turned the idea down.”

“Doctor Who was a happy confusion.  I didn’t know what I was going to do with that.”

“Elisabeth [Sladen], she’s a wonderful girl, but she’s also a beautiful actress with great sensitivity.  She was marvellous.”

“I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment.  Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it’s so boring.”

“I used to get terribly tired of Tom Baker.  When I was Tom Baker, my life was pretty quiet.  But now I’ve become a doctor - without the hassle of training - I have a much more colourful life.”

“I was known all over the world.  I didn’t need credit cards, I was welcomed in everybody’s house.  But in the afternoon, there I was in the bloody stewpots of Soho, absolutely raving it up, pissing it up like a good ’un.”

“Jim Acheson, our designer, told me I looked like his Auntie Wyn and I have never forgotten it.  I wondered if it was the way I walked or wore my hat, but Jim just said that I had some indefinable air of an aunt.  It was then I began to hope that one day I might play Lady Bracknell.”

“Most of my ideas were rejected and I got used to it.  One can get fond of almost anything, even rejection.”

“Playing Doctor Who came as a great surprise to me.  I had no idea that I would enjoy it so much.  All that was required of me was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction.”

“Some people think that [producer] Philip Hinchcliffe’s days were the best days.  He was fresh and I was fresh, so maybe that is why it appears that those serials were better.”

“[Favourite monster] I must say I did enjoy Davros in Genesis of the Daleks, because Michael Wisher did work so seriously and was unbendingly passionate about the character.  He used to make me howl with laughter!  When he used to put the bag over his head, that used to crucify me!”

“[The scarf] Jim Acheson designed it, bought the wool and gave it to someone’s relation at the BBC called Begonia Pope.  Jim gave her the design and she knitted up all the wool.  Jim of course had no knowledge about knitting except for colour and bought ten times the amount of wool that was needed, and she knitted the lot!”

“[The story he’d most like to see on video] The Ark in Space, I think, because I admire Roger Murray Leach’s wonderful circular set in that one.”

“Fans are crucial.  You can’t live without fans.  Unless you are some kind of Carthusian monk, then you must have one fan and that’s your partner.  Then you have a little family and you’ve got four fans.  Some nice neighbours and you’ve got 11 fans.  But if you’re a star footballer or Doctor Who in 1976 then you’d have millions of fans!”

“I’m obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience.  But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.”

“The loyalty of fans, if one responds to it, is that it is absolutely blind”

“The notion that God was everywhere put paid to any possible peace of mind by the time I was six.”

“All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things.  All my life I have suffered from bad dreams.  All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.”

“Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid.”

“The chaos of our lives suited me; I don’t think I wanted it to end.”

“Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren’t they?  They’re always telling us what’s going to happen, and we know they don’t know!”

“I am a one success man.”

“’Would you like to go to New Zealand to do a commercial?’ That’s the sort of question an actor likes to hear from his agent in freezing mid-January.”

“I am used to being mistaken for Miriam Margolyes; Private Eye noticed that, and once I was even taken for Gertrude Stein.  But that was at Chelsea Flower Show where uncertainty of identity is in the air.”

“I feigned idiocy right through my National Service and got away with murder.  I’d say, ‘I won’t be shouted at by a bunch of professional murderers.’”

“I never examined what I did in any great detail because I thought it would spoil things.  I never read the scripts at all carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that being a benevolent alien that’s the way it should be.”

“I was brought up among Irish pubs and Irish priests and brainwashed with this preoccupation with death.  Which is why I perhaps still wander round graveyards, collecting strange epitaphs...”

“Not only don’t I know who I am, but I’m very suspicious of people who do know who they are.  I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!”

“People say, ‘Christ!  Tom Baker!  Is he still alive?’”

“These days when I see a child in Waitrose and smile and say, ‘Hello, are you going to visit your Mum in her sheltered accommodation when you grow up?’ it provokes glistening eyes and hollow laughter.  And if you pursue it with, ‘Or are you going to be a drug dealer?’ it may result in a snub.”

“Until I was 22, I was totally preoccupied with religion.  I must admit that I only did it [became a monk] to get away from my background.”

“We are all quite capable of believing in anything as long as it’s improbable.”

“When you’re an actor and you’re discovering a script, such as it is, you open it and say, ‘Christ, it’s the same as last week’s whippet-shit’ or ‘My god, it’s a Spud-U-Like with dog vomit.’ But the director says: ‘Don’t say that Tom, please don’t say that.’ And you reply, ‘But it is!  It’s dog vomit, isn’t it George?’ Then he says, ‘Well yeah, but we’ve got to do something with it.’”

Tom Baker has appeared in the following films:
The Winter’s Tale (1967)
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
I racconti di Canterbury (1972)
Cari genitori (1973)
The Vault of Horror (1973)
Luther (1974)
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)
The Mutations (1974)
Loose Shoes (1980)
The Passionate Pilgrim (1984)
The Law Lord (1991)
Backtime (1998)
Dungeons & Dragons (2000)
The Magic Roundabout (2005)