Peter Bayliss
Peter Bayliss stood over six feet tall with a voice to match, and he spent a career decorating that voice: wheezes, croaks, mutterings, and, as the opera singer in Frontiers of Farce, gargling. Very few character actors have a documented repertoire of noises.
He trained at the Italia Conti Academy and with the John Gielgud Company, and the stage stayed the spine of the work. He was in The Matchmaker at the Royale in New York in 1956 and in Ross at the Haymarket in London in 1960. Around that ran some twenty films, from an uncredited aide in Caesar and Cleopatra to Benz in From Russia with Love and Lord Alex Grant in John Schlesinger's Darling, plus more than forty television productions, among them Please Sir!, The Sweeney and Coronation Street.
The later work leaned into the grotesque comedy the voice invited: Mr. Dodo in the 1999 television Alice in Wonderland, a physician in the Arabian Nights miniseries, and Alfie Doolittle at the Cameron Mackintosh gala Hey, Mr. Producer!. It is a thoroughly British kind of career, where the same actor turns up in a Bond film and as a talking bird in a children's fantasy, and does both without adjusting his register very much.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Peter Bayliss
The obvious first stop is From Russia with Love. He is in it as Benz, and the film around him is arguably the best Bond picture anyone made.
Darling is the more interesting acting job, Schlesinger's cold study of London ambition, with Bayliss as Lord Alex Grant among a crowd of people being awful to each other in beautiful rooms.
The late work is where the noises live. Alice in Wonderland hands him Mr. Dodo in a starry television version aimed at children, Arabian Nights uses him as a physician in the same sort of production, and Hey, Mr. Producer! The Musical World of Cameron Mackintosh catches him singing Alfie Doolittle at a West End gala. Caesar and Cleopatra is the completist footnote: he is in there, uncredited, in 1945.