Tom Baker

Born: January 20 1934
Where: Liverpool, England, UK

The former monk is best known as the fourth incarnation of intergalactic time traveller Dr Who in the BBC series.

He has been introduced to a new audience of fans as the fruitily surreal voiceover on the off-kilter British comedy Little Britain.

The son of an Irish barmaid and a Jewish sailor, Baker left home at 15 to become a monk with the Brothers of Ploermel on the Channel Island of Jersey.

Six years later, he abandoned the monastic life and performed his National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he became interested in acting.

Baker then served on the Queen Mary for seven months as a sailor in the Merchant Navy before attending Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Kent.

He trod the boards in repertory theaters around Britain until the late 1960s when he joined the National Theatre, where he performed with Maggie Smith and Anthony Hopkins.

Laurence Olivier helped him get his first prominent film role in 1971 as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra, which earned him two Golden Globe nominations.

Subsequent appearances included Pasolini's I Raconti Di Canterbury and the horror yarns The Vault of Horror and The Mutations.

However, success was elusive and he was working as a labourer on a building site when he landed the title role in Dr Who in 1974.

After playing the Time Lord for seven years, Baker returned to the the theatre as well as concentrating on television work, including Sherlock Holmes in The Hounds of the Baskervilles.

Other small screen work included Selling Hitler and Dungeons & Dragons before his distinctive tones were used by David Walliams and Matt Lucas for Little Britain.

In 2005, he supplied the voice of Zeebad in the big screen adaptation of children's classic The Magic Roundabout.