Career
Born in London where his father was a Billingsgate fish merchant, Baker was educated at a Lycée in Rouen, France, and at the City of London School. From 1934 to 1939, he worked for Gainsborough Pictures, a British film production company based in the Islington district of London. His first jobs were menial, making tea for crew members, for example, but by 1938 he had risen to the level of as assistant director on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).
He served in the Army during World War II, transferring to the Army Kinematograph Unit in 1943 to make better use of his skills as a production manager and director on documentaries. One of his superiors at the time was novelist Eric Ambler, who insisted on Baker being given 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. His next two films, The Weaker Sex (1948) and Paper Orchid (1949) were popular but overshadowed by the success of Morning Departure (1950), also featuring John Mills.
Morning Departure drew international attention to Baker's talent and prompted Darryl Zanuck, production head of 20th Century Fox, to invite him to Hollywood, though his first film for the company - I'll Never Forget You - was made in the UK. During the early 1950s, Baker worked for three years at Fox where he directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and Robert Ryan in the 3-D film noir Inferno (1953). He returned to the UK in 1953 and continued to work on films.
He worked for television during the 1960s. He directed episodes of The Avengers, The Saint, The Persuaders!, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and 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, among others, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Scars of Dracula (1970) for Hammer, and Asylum (1972) and The Vault of Horror (1973) for Amicus. He also directed Bette Davis in the black comedy The Anniversary (1968).
In the latter part of the 1970s he returned to television, and throughout the 1980s continued to work on shows such as Minder. He retired in 1992.
Read more about this topic: Roy Ward Baker
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)