Roy Ward Baker
Directing
Born 1916-12-19
Died 2010-10-05
London, England
71 credits
Read biography
Roy Ward Baker was an English film director born in London on 19 December 1916. His best known film is A Night to Remember which won a Golden Globe for best foreign English language film in 1959. His later career was varied, and included many horror films and television shows.
Baker's early career, from 1934 to 1939, was spent working for Gainsborough Pictures, a British film production company based in Islington, North London, famous for its prestige productions. His first jobs were menial - making tea for crew members, for example - but by 1938 he had risen through the ranks to work as assistant director on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
He served in the army during World War II, until transferring to the Army Kinematograph Unit in 1943 in order to make better use of skills developed in his pre-war career producing documentaries and teaching materials for troops. One of his superiors at the time was novelist Eric Ambler. It was he who gave Baker his first big break directing The October Man, from an Ambler screenplay, in 1947. Ambler also adapted Walter Lord's A Night to Remember for Baker's 1958 screen version.
During the early 1950s, Baker worked for three years in Hollywood where he directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and Robert Ryan in 3D film noir Inferno (1953). He returned to the UK for the latter part of the decade, but defected to television in the early 1960s.
He directed episodes of The Avengers, The Saint and The Champions - all adventure series created with an eye on the American market. The low-budget ethic of television production made him well-suited to his next career move into cheaply produced but lavish-looking British horror films. He directed, amongst others, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Scars of Dracula (1970) for Hammer, and Asylum (1972) for Amicus.
In the latter part of the 1970s he returned to television, and throughout the 1980s continued to work in Television. He retired in 1992.
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Filmography
— top 60 of 71
Directing
52 credits
The Avengers
The Saint
Minder
Gideon's Way
The Persuaders!
The Champions
The Protectors
Return of the Saint
Department S
The Human Jungle
Journey to the Unknown
Jason King
Danger UXB
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
The Baron
The Vampire Lovers
A Night to Remember
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
Asylum
The Irish R.M.
Q.E.D.
Scars of Dracula
Quatermass and the Pit
Don't Bother to Knock
The Flame Trees of Thika
The Monster Club
The One That Got Away
The Vault of Horror
Saracen
And Now the Screaming Starts!
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde
Moon Zero Two
Paper Orchid
The Anniversary
Mission: Monte Carlo
Inferno
Two Left Feet
The Weaker Sex
Morning Departure
Night Without Sleep
The House in the Square
The Singer Not the Song
The Fiction Makers
Foreign Exchange
The October Man
Passage Home
The Masks of Death
The Valiant
Highly Dangerous
The Spy Killer
Flame in the Streets
Tiger in the Smoke
Acting
6 credits
A History of Horror
Sodankylä Forever
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror
Hitchcock: Alfred the Great
Tudor Rose
The Saint Steps In... To Television
Other credits
3 credits
Producing
2 credits
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