** The Egg ** Environmental History
** Growing Habits ** Observations **

Environmental History

"Just for purely acting charms, it's a great role to play," -1993 interview about his portrayal of the seventh Doctor.

"You're asked to call upon all sorts of acting in it. From kind of merry to mad, and al the various things in between."

McCoy was born James Kent-Smith in Dunoon, Scotland, in 1943. His father had been killedin the War a couple of months earlier and, as his mother subsequently suffered from mental health problems, he was brought up mainly by his grandmother and aunts.

He attended a local school and from there went on to Blair's College, a seminary in Aberdeen, where between the ages of twelve and sixteen he trained to be a priest. He eventually applied to join a Dominican order as a monk but was tunred down as he was too young. He went instead to Dunoon grammar school, where on getting to know his female fellow pupils he quickly abandoned the idea of becoming a priest or a monk. On finishing his education he moved to London, where his grammar school education won him immediate employment with an insurrance company in the city.

He trained in this job and continued it until the age of twenty-seven, when he decided that it was not really for him. The pop music and theater industries were booming at the time, and he felt that entertainment was an area that he would prefer to get into. He managed to obtain a job sellin tickets and keeping the box office records at London's Roundhouse Theater where through a friendship with the actor Brian Murphay, he met director Ken Campbell and agreed to join him in a new venture called The Ken Campbell Roadshow.

It was Campbell who subsequently devised the name of Sylveste McCoy for a stuntman character in a show that they were performing, and he later decided to adopt that as his stage identity after a critic misunderstood it to be his real name. After several years the name evolved into its final form.

The stunts that McCoy undertook in Campbell's show included setting light to his head, putting ferrets down his trousers, exploding bombs on his chest and hammering nails up his nose, all of which earned him a reputation as an ecentric, daredevil performer. The show was a great success and went on a tour all over Eurpoe. It also gave McCoy an opportunity t obreak into legitamite theater, and he soon found himself being invited to appear in numerous plays and musicals. It was while he was starring at the National Theater in The Pied Piper, a play written especially for him, that he heard that the BBC were looking for a new lead actor to replace Colin Baker in Doctor Who. He had applied for the job once before, when Peter Davison had relinquished the role, but had discovered that Baker had already been cast.

Undaunted, he telephoned John Nathan-Turner to put himself forward once more. By a strange coincidence, moments after they had finished speaking, a BBC producer named Clive DOig, with whom McCoy had worked, also telephoned Nathan-Turner to suggest that he would make a good Doctor. Nathan-Turner, although initially suspecting collusion, was sufficiently intrigued to go and see McCoy in The Pied Piper in January 1987. He was greatly impressed and eventually offered McCoy the role of the seventh Doctor.

"Suddenly there I was," Recalled McCoy in a later interview,
"a lunatic actor, thrown into this extrodinary world, which for the most part I enjoyed enormously."

The enduring image of McCoy's Doctor is of a lively fellow with dark wavy hair and a faint scots accent, sporting a paisley-patterned scarf and a question-mark pullover and brolly.

"I definately started off playing it for laughs," He commented.
"I hadn't watched Doctor Who for years, but had memories of Patrick Troughton, Jon Petwee and early Tom Baker. I remembered it as being humorous and so started doing it like that. As it developed, my Doctor became very serious with the comic element there. I was moving toward that end."

Please visit this spiffy Sylvester McCoy site, it is simply wonderful.

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The Noingy's Websneeze
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