The best guest actors on season 17 of "Doctor Who"
In order from greatest to least.
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- Actor
- Soundtrack
Julian Wyatt Glover was born on March 27, 1935 in Hampstead, London, England, to Honor Ellen Morgan (Wyatt), a BBC journalist, and Claude Gordon Glover, a BBC radio producer. He is of English, Scottish and Welsh ancestry. Primarily a classical stage actor, Glover trained at the National Youth Theatre, performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and became a familiar face to British television viewers by appearing in many popular series during the 1960s and 1970s. His talent for accents and cold expression made him an ideal choice for playing refined villains. Glover's guest appearances on television include series such as The Avengers (1961), Doctor Who (1963), Space: 1999 (1975), Blake's 7 (1978), Remington Steele (1982) and Merlin (2008). He also played the recurring role of Grand Master Pycelle on 31 episodes of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011).
During the 1980s, Glover achieved some fame in Hollywood with roles in popular films such as General Maximilian Veers in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the Greek villain Aristotle Kristatos in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981), Brian Harcourt-Smith in the Cold War thriller The Fourth Protocol (1987) and Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). In the film version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), he provided the voice of the giant spider Aragog. He was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to drama.Count / Tancredi
(City of Death)- Born Leeds, England and trained at Old Vic Theatre School, 1947-1949. First stage appearance in "Tough at the Top" (C.B. Cochran's last musical) in 1949, followed by seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Glasgow Citizen's and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. First in London's West End in "The Happy Time" (1952) and more recently in "Worzel Gummidge", "A Month of Sundays", "Maria" and "Unfinished Business". Overseas: played Caesar in "Caesar and Cleopatra" (International Festival, Paris, 1956); Ravinia Shakespeare Festival (Chicago, 1964); Pickering in "My Fair Lady" (Houston, 1991). In 1998 he was nominated as "Best Actor" for the Royal Midland Television Awards for his role as Alby James in an episode of Peak Practice (1993).Organon
(The Creature from the Pit) - Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
English stage, screen and voice actor. Worked at the Oldham Coliseum before joining the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Subsequently acted in repertory theatre and at the West End. Later started to work for the BBC. From 1967 to 1988, voiced many a Dalek (as well as Cybermen) in "Doctor Who".Dalek Voices
(Destiny of the Daleks)- John Bailey was born on 26 June 1912 in Lewisham, London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Celia (1949), The Forsyte Saga (1967) and Doctor Who (1963). He died on 11 February 1989 in Chelsea, London, England, UK.Sezom
(The Horns of Nimon) - Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Peter Straker was born on 7 November 1943 in Jamaica. He is an actor and composer, known for Alicja (1982), Doctor Who (1963) and The Chastity Belt (1972).Commander Sharrel
(Destiny of the Daleks)- Born in Budapest, Hungary, her true name is Katherina Freiin Schell von Bauschlott, the scion of a once wealthy German patrician family. Her father, the Baron Paul Schell von Bauschlott, was a well-respected diplomat until the Nazis confiscated their estates during WWII, while her mother was Countess Katharina Maria Etelka Georgina Elisabeth Teleki de Szék. Her family was living in poverty until 1948 when they sought asylum in Vienna and Salzburg as the communist regime began to take hold in Hungary. In 1950, her family emigrated to the States and Baron von Schell Bauschlott renounced his title in order for his family to gain citizenship. Catherine entered a convent school in New York's Staten Island area. In 1957, her father joined Radio Free Europe, taking the family to Munich where she developed an interest for acting and trained at the prestigious Falconberg School. Her inauspicious debut (sometimes billed as Catherine von Schell) was in the German film Lana, Queen of the Amazons (1964). While filming Amsterdam Affair (1968), she met and married actor William Marlowe, subsequently moving to London. She went on to appear in Moon Zero Two (1969), the James Bond feature On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Callan (1974) and The Black Windmill (1974), but is best known at that time for the slapstick comedy The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), which marked Peter Sellers' cinematic revisiting of his "Inspector Clouseau" character. Extremely visible on TV with frequent work in such series as The Persuaders! (1971), The Adventurer (1972) and the cult sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975) starring Barbara Bain and Martin Landau playing the role of "Maya", an alien, for which she is best known. Her marriage to actor Marlowe had run its course by 1977, and she met director Bill Hays that same year, who had two children from a previous marriage. They married in 1982, together working on a TV production of A Month in the Country (1985). Her career began to wane by the time she did the series Wish Me Luck (1987) and she retired shortly thereafter, running a small guest hotel in France. Catherine is often mistakenly thought of as a sister of actors Maximilian Schell, Maria Schell, Immy Schell and Carl Schell, but she is not. One of her two brothers, Paul von Schell, is, however, the widower of actress Hildegard Knef.Countess
(City of Death) - Voice of the Nimon
(The Horns of Nimon) - Myra Frances was born on 13 April 1942 in Hastings, East Sussex, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Survivors (1975), Heidi (1974) and Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! (1974). She was married to Peter Egan and Robert Taylor. She died on 30 March 2021 in Surrey, England, UK.Lady Adrasta
(The Creature from the Pit) - Huntsman
(The Creature from the Pit) - Australian stage, screen and TV actor Lewis Fiander was educated at Trinity Grammar School and made his acting debut at the National Theatre in Melbourne in 1954. At the age of 18 he moved to Sydney to broaden his skills as a radio actor and in due course perfected a varied gallery of dialects and accents. On the stage, he specialized in Shakespearean comedy, including "Twelfth Night" and "The Merchant of Venice", though in later years taking on diverse roles in musical plays, works by Ibsen and O'Neill, even as Professor Higgins in a Victorian Arts Centre production of "My Fair Lady".
Fiander moved to London with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in the early 60's and spent the next two decades in the U.K., often side by side with some of the giants of his profession, including Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. In 1966, he toured New Zealand with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The following year he landed the prized role of Mr. Darcy in a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (1967). A break in his stage and TV work permitted him to act on the big screen in two back-to-back horror films: Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971) and as one of the victims in Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). He is also remembered by fans of Doctor Who (1963) as the drug smuggling scientist Professor Tryst in the notorious Tom Baker serial Nightmare of Eden: Part One (1979). Tryst's strange Germanic accent (Fiander's own idea) - combined with the square spectacles and histrionics - seems somehow reminiscent of Peter Sellers's Dr. Strangelove. Either that or something from Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969).
Back on the stage, Fiander enjoyed perhaps his greatest success starring as John Adams in the 1970 London New Theatre production of "1776", a play with music about the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. He had another palpable hit as actor-singer in 1986, teaming up with Patricia Hodge for "Noël and Gertie", a compilation of musical numbers originally written by Noël Coward and performed in tandem with Gertrude Lawrence. In the late 80's, Fiander returned to Australia and appeared several times on television, notably in the mini-series Tanamera - Lion of Singapore (1989) and Bangkok Hilton (1989).Professor Tryst
(Nightmare of Eden) - Tim Barlow was born on 18 January 1936 in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Hot Fuzz (2007), Les Misérables (1998) and Automata (2014). He died on 20 January 2023 in the UK.Tyssan
(Destiny of the Daleks) - Actor
- Soundtrack
Barry Andrews was born in 1944 in the UK. He is an actor, known for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Department S (1969).Stott
(Nightmare of Eden)- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
David Graham was born on 11 July 1925 in Hackney, London, England, UK. He is an actor and writer, known for Thunderbird 6 (1968), Stingray (1964) and Supercar (1961).Kerensky
(City of Death)- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
John Cleese was born on October 27, 1939, in Weston-Super-Mare, England, to Muriel Evelyn (Cross) and Reginald Francis Cleese. He was born into a family of modest means, his father being an insurance salesman; but he was nonetheless sent off to private schools to obtain a good education. Here he was often tormented for his height, having reached a height of six feet by the age of twelve, and eventually discovered that being humorous could deflect aggressive behavior in others. He loved humor in and of itself, collected jokes, and, like many young Britons who would grow up to be comedians, was devoted to the radio comedy show, "The Goon Show," starring the legendary Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe.
Cleese did well in both sports and academics, but his real love was comedy. He attended Cambridge to read (study) Law, but devoted a great deal of time to the university's legendary Footlights group, writing and performing in comedy reviews, often in collaboration with future fellow Python Graham Chapman. Several of these comedy reviews met with great success, including one in particular which toured under the name "Cambridge Circus." When Cleese graduated, he went on to write for the BBC, then rejoined Cambridge Circus in 1964, which toured New Zealand and America. He remained in America after leaving Cambridge Circus, performing and doing a little journalism, and here met Terry Gilliam, another future Python.
Returning to England, he began appearing in a BBC radio series, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again", based on Cambridge Circus. It ran for several years and also starred future Goodies Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden. He also appeared, briefly, with Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman in At Last the 1948 Show (1967), for television, and a series of collaborations with some of the finest comedy-writing talent in England at the time, some of whom - Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Chapman - eventually joined him in Monty Python. These programs included The Frost Report (1966) and Marty Feldman's program Marty (1968). Eventually, however, the writers were themselves collected to be the talent for their own program, Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969), which displayed a strange and completely absorbing blend of low farce and high-concept absurdist humor, and remains influential to this day.
After three seasons of the intensity of Monty Python, Cleese left the show, though he collaborated with one or more of the other Pythons for decades to come, including the Python movies released in the mid-70s to early 80s - Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), and The Meaning of Life (1983). Cleese and then-wife Connie Booth collaborated in the legendary television series Fawlty Towers (1975), as the sharp-tongued, rude, bumbling yet somehow lovable proprietor of an English seaside hotel. Cleese based this character on a proprietor he had met while staying with the other Pythons at a hotel in Torquay, England. Only a dozen episodes were made, but each is truly hilarious, and he is still closely associated with the program to this day.
Meanwhile Cleese had established a production company, Video Arts, for clever business training videos in which he generally starred, which were and continue to be enormously successful in the English-speaking world. He continues to act prolifically in movies, including in the hit comedy A Fish Called Wanda (1988), in the Harry Potter series, and in the James Bond series as the new Q, starting with The World Is Not Enough (1999), in which he began as R before graduating to Q. Cleese also supplies his voice to numerous animated and video projects, and frequently does commercials.
Besides the infamous Basil Fawlty character, Cleese's other well-known trademark is his rendition of an English upper-class toff. He has a daughter with Connie Booth and a daughter with his second wife, Barbara Trentham.
Education and learning are important elements of his life - he was Rector of the University of Saint Andrews from 1973 until 1976, and continues to be a professor-at-large of Cornell University in New York. Cleese lives in Santa Barbara, California.Art Gallery Visitor
(City of Death)
(He's last on the list because he was only in one very short scene.)