Sylvester McCoy

Sylvester McCoy was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith on 20 August 1943, the only child of Molly Sheridan and Percy James Kent-Smith, a couple living in Dunoon, Scotland. His mother was Irish. Percy James Kent-Smith was killed in the Second World War a couple of months before his son was born, and he was brought up by his mother, his grandmother (Mary Sheridan), and his aunts. He attended St Muns Primary School in Dunoon. The headmistress, Rosie O'Grady, was keen that her young charges obtain decent jobs upon leaving the school and so organized regular talks from people in all manner of professions. McCoy expressed an interest in every job, and as a result eventually found himself given an afternoon off school to go to see a local priest about entering the priesthood. He left school, joined Blairs College, a Catholic seminary in Aberdeen, and between the ages of twelve and sixteen trained to be a priest. At Blairs College, he realized that there was more to life than could be found in Dunoon and discovered classical music and history, which fascinated him. He eventually decided to become a monk and applied to join a Dominican order, but his application was rejected as he was too young. He returned to school and soon discovered the delights of the opposite sex in the form of fellow students and determined he didn't want to be a priest or a monk after all. On finishing his education he took a holiday down to London, from which he never returned. McCoy approached a youth employment center looking for a job and impressed by the fact that he had attended a grammar school, they instantly found him a job in the City working for an insurance company. He trained in this job and stayed there until he was 27 before deciding that it wasn't really for him. With the help of a cook at London's Roundhouse Theatre, McCoy gained a job there selling tickets and keeping the books in the box office. McCoy joined the Ken Campbell Roadshow. Along with Bob Hoskins, Jane Wood, and Dave Hill, he would start performing a range of plays with the umbrella theme of "modern myths". McCoy found himself in a double-act with Hoskins. After Hoskins left, and being booked at a circus, director Ken Campbell improvised a circus-based act about a fictitious stuntman called Sylvester McCoy and thought it would be amusing if the program stated that this character was played by "Sylvester McCoy". While at the Royal Court Theatre, one of the critics missed the joke and assumed that Sylvester McCoy was a real person. McCoy liked the irony of this and adopted the name of his stage identity. During one of their UK engagements, the Roadshow team was invited up by Joan Littlewood, who was directing a production of "The Hostage", before the performance of her play. This led McCoy to bona fide theater, and he was subsequently invited to appear in numerous plays and musicals.

Despite forming a close bond with co-star Sophie Aldred and the general standard of the stories rising again towards the end, the series was obviously starved of funds and ratings were fairly poor throughout the McCoy era, with the series being trounced by ITV's Coronation Street (1960).

McCoy was starring at the National Theatre in "The Pied Piper", a play written especially for him, when he learned that the BBC was looking for a new lead actor to replace Colin Baker, who had been unceremoniously dumped from Doctor Who (1963) on the orders of Michael Grade. McCoy won the role as the Seventh Doctor despite reservations from Grade and Head of Drama Jonathan Powell, who were by this time monitoring producer John Nathan-Turner's decision-making very closely. McCoy's first season took the slightly pantomimic style of Baker's final season, Trial of a Time Lord, even further and received a very dubious reception from the press and fans. Nathan-Turner put McCoy in a pullover covered in question marks, which McCoy later admitted he didn't like. By the time of McCoy's second season, the new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, was trying to make the series darker and more complex. In the third season, his costume was changed from a fawn jacket and paisley scarf to a dark brown jacket and an altogether more muted and subdued image, but the pullover remained.

The BBC's opinion of Doctor Who (1963) was that it was an embarrassment.

After Doctor Who (1963) McCoy worked extensively in theater and on television.

He has two roles in common with John Hurt: (1) Hurt played the Fool in King Lear (1983) while McCoy played him in King Lear (2008) and (2) McCoy played the Seventh Doctor in Doctor Who (1963) and Doctor Who (1996) while Hurt played the War Doctor in Doctor Who (2005).

McCoy and Timothy Dalton appeared together on stage in London in 1986 and complained to each other that long-term work was so hard to find. The next year, both had screen acting breaks when McCoy was cast as the Seventh Doctor in Doctor Who (1963) and Dalton was cast as James Bond in The Living Daylights (1987). However, both McCoy's tenure as the Doctor and Dalton's tenure as Bond proved short-lived as both of these iconic British franchises were cancelled in 1989 for several years and recast when they eventually returned.

Nesbitt (1988). He also created the character of Crud in the cult television series Ghoul Lashed for Sky TV.

In 1989, the new series head, Peter Cregeen, pulled the plug.

In theater he appeared in "The Government Inspector" twice in tours during 1993 and 1994, and in between these he starred as the Narrator, Thomas Marvel, in the stage version of H. G. Wells's "The Invisible Man".

On television, his credits include Frank Stubbs Promotes (1993) and Rab C.

In 1995, he starred in Zorro: The Musical".

In 1996, he was contracted to reprise his role as the Doctor, handing over to an eighth incarnation of the Time Lord in the earthly form of his friend Paul McGann.

He reportedly took offence to the line written by Mark Gatiss and delivered by David Walliams in the BBC2 sketch The Pitch of Fear (1999) in which Sydney Newman says the Doctor could be played "by any f***** with an Equity Card" towards the end of its run. It was subsequently edited from the version included on a DVD at Gatiss' request. McCoy's acting work has included performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He was considered for the role of Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). He played Radagast the Brown in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

He became the first of three non-English actors to portray the character of the Doctor and the first of many actors to speak with an accent other than Received Pronunciation English: Christopher Eccleston portrayed the Ninth Doctor in 2005 with a Northern accent, David Tennant is a fellow Scot who portrayed the Doctor from 2005 to 2010 with a London/Estuary accent, Peter Capaldi is likewise Scottish and plays the Twelfth Doctor with his natural accent, and Jodie Whittaker plays the role with her Yorkshire accent.