Sylvester McCoy

Sylvester McCoy was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith in Dunoon in 1943 and made his name as a physical comedian long before anyone handed him a science fiction series. British children's television is where most of the country first saw him, on Vision On, Tiswas and Going Live!.

He took over Doctor Who in 1987 and played the part until 1989, which made him the seventh Doctor and the last of the classic run. He arrived as a clown, all pratfalls and rolled Scottish vowels, and then the writing quietly turned him into the most manipulative Doctor the show had produced, a man several moves ahead who is not telling his friends what the plan is. That reading of the character has outlasted the era it came from and shaped a good deal of what the revived series does now. He was also the Doctor who was on air when the BBC cancelled the show, which gave him the odd job of being the last one standing.

Rather than let go, he kept the role alive across decades, in Dimensions in Time in 1993, the 1996 television film, and The Power of the Doctor in 2022. Peter Jackson then cast him as Radagast the Brown across the three Hobbit films, a wizard the scripts treat as comic relief and McCoy plays with total sincerity, which is the only reason the character survives at all.

He has kept working in horror and comedy since, in The Owners, Slumber, Igor in The Munsters and a stretch on Still Game. Two years in a leading role, and nearly forty years of being one of the Doctors, is a strange shape for a career and he has made the most of it.