Gentleman and player

During my brief stint as a showbiz scribe – which unfortunately came to an end when I expressed a preference for profiling Gerald Harper rather than Jean-Claude Van Damme – I had the privilege of interviewing George Baker (celebrated as Chief Inspector Wexford in ITV’s The Ruth Rendell Mysteries), whom I had admired since his days as a clean-cut, young officer in British films of the Fifties. What struck me most about this unusually tall actor was his impeccable courtesy. I arrived disgracefully late for our lunch in Soho, and we were then pestered by one of the neighbourhood topers, but Baker’s beautiful manners were a humbling object lesson in good behaviour. After reading his enjoyable autobiography I am all the more impressed, for he claims to possess a bad temper (which perhaps one should have guessed from his tour-de-force as Tiberius, suppurating with syphilis and, we now learn, encrusted with cornflakes, in I, Claudius); and at the time I met him his second wife must have been seriously ill.