The Singer Not the Song

Roy Ward Baker (born 19 December, 1916) is an English film director born in London. His best known film is A Night to Remember (1958) which won a Golden Globe for best foreign English language film in 1959. His later career included many horror films and television shows.

From 1934 to 1939, Baker was with Gainsborough Pictures, a British film production company based in Islington, North 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, 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, 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 the 3D film noir Inferno (1953). He returned to the UK for the latter part of the decade, but worked for 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, among others, Quatermass and the Pit (1967) The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Scars of Dracula (1970) for Hammer, and Asylum (1972) and 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.

He has contributed interviews to several DVD extras in recent years, such as those with The Saint, and took part in the 2007 BBC 2 documentary series British Film Forever. —Wikipedia