Screen star who fought racial prejudice
WHEN Thomas Baptiste left his native Guyana for Britain, he told his wealthy landowner father than he intended to study agriculture.
But on his arrival in London aged 21, he got a factory job and enrolled at Morley College to study music, starting his professional life as a baritone singer.
He joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and during that time entered the Richard Tauber international singers’ competition, coming third.
This led to him studying with Joan Cross and winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, London.
But sensing that opportunities for a black baritone were limited, he took a dramatic role in Eric Maschwitz’s Summer Song in 1956.
Baptiste continued to sing but acting became his main career, with stage roles in Noël Coward’s Nude With Violin, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Pygmalion.
He also moved into screen work, appearing in Coronation Street in 1963 as the first ever black character – a bus driver called Johnny Alexander who was sacked as a result of a racist altercation with Len Fairclough.
In sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, Baptiste played a doctor in a scene when Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett turns up for treatment after initiating a racist punch-up at the football.
Baptiste fought prejudice off screen too, co-founding an African-Asian committee of the actors’ union Equity. In 1992 he said black actors in Britain had more difficulty starting their careers than he had 40 years previously.
His other screen highlights included a cameo in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1971 with Glenda Jackson, and appearances in many of the 15 episodes of Empire Road,
the first all-black TV soap which began in 1978. Several BBC plays also marked his television career including John Hopkins’ Fable in 1965 and Alun Owen’s Pal in 1971.
Baptiste had a wide circle of friends, with 14 godchildren, and was part of Princess Margaret’s Mustique set.
He retired to St Lucia but lived his last 10 years in Hove, Sussex.