Roy Ward Baker (1916-2010) b. London, England.

Roy Baker served a 13-year apprenticeship, first with Gainsborough Films between 1934-1939, then making wartime films for service personnel during World War II. He emerged during the post-war years as one of Britain’s most solid stylists and began his directorial career with The October Man (1947). He moved to Hollywood for a period during the early 1950′s before returning to Britain. Many of his films were the most popular successes of the British cinema during the post-war years, including Morning Departure (1950), A Night to Remember (1958) and The One That Got Away (1957). From 1960, however, he was hard at work on television, in such series as Danger Man, The Saint and The Avengers. On his return to the cinema in 1967, billed as Roy Ward Baker, he no longer seemed the same director, and indeed directed entirely different kinds of subjects, mainly horror films. Of these, only Asylum (1972), Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) carry a genuine charge of fear.