Deaths 2022

Deaths 2021

Deaths 2020

Deaths 2019

Deaths 2018

Deaths 2017

Deaths 2016

Deaths 2015

Deaths 2014

Deaths 2013

Deaths 2012

Deaths 2011

Deaths 2010

Deaths 2009


Full list by date of death

Roy (Ward) Baker

Director

Born - 19 December 1916, London, England
Died - 5 October 2010

British director who, after a long apprenticeship with Gainsborough Pictures UK, working his way up from tea boy to assistant director, joined the British cinema's post-war boom with a suspenseful psychological thriller, The October Man (1947), which showed his flair for atmosphere and pictorial style. He then established his reputation with two excellent films, The Weaker Sex (1948) and Morning Departure (1949). But it was a film he made for 20th Century-Fox's British arm, The House in the Square (1951) that led to an offer to work for the studio in Hollywood. His first two films there, Don't Bother to Knock and Night Without Sleep were undistinguished, but his third, Inferno (1953), the studio's first 3D film was a cracking exercise in suspense. But he resigned (wise man) from the studio's White Witch Doctor (1954) and returned to Britain, where he made Passage Home (1955), Jacqueline (1956), The One That Got Away (1957) and A Night to Remember (1958), all big hits. After Flame in the Streets (1961), Baker worked more consistently on TV series. Re-emerging in 1967 as Roy Ward Baker (his actual middle name was Horace), he became a director of horror films: Quatermass and the Pit (1967), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), the scary Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973), The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) and The Monster Club (1980), his last feature film, although he continued to work in TV, notably on the much-praised series The Flame Trees of Thika, until 1992.