Roy Ward Baker

Roy Ward Baker
on set, in 1961
Born	Roy Horace Baker (1916-12-19)19 December 1916 London, England
Died	5 October 2010(2010-10-05) (aged 93) London, England
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1947–1992

Roy Ward Baker (19 December 1916 – 5 October 2010), born Roy Horace Baker, was an English film director, credited as Roy Baker for much of his career. His best known film is A Night to Remember (1958) which won a Golden Globe for Best English-Language Foreign Film in 1959. His later career included many horror films and television shows.

Born in London where his father was a Billingsgate fish merchant, Baker was educated at a Lycée in Rouen, France, and at the City of London School. From 1934 to 1939, he worked for Gainsborough Pictures, a British film production company based in the Islington district of London. His first jobs were menial, making tea for crew members, for example, but by 1938 he had risen to the level of assistant director on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).

He served in the Army during the Second World War, transferring to the Army Kinematograph Unit in 1943 to make better use of his skills as a production manager and director on documentaries. One of his superiors at the time was novelist Eric Ambler, who insisted on Baker being given his first big break directing The October Man, from an Ambler screenplay, in 1947. Ambler also adapted Walter Lord's A Night to Remember for Baker's 1958 screen version. His next two films, The Weaker Sex (1948) and Paper Orchid (1949) were popular but overshadowed by the success of Morning Departure (1950), also featuring John Mills.