Sylvester McCoy
| Sylvester McCoy | |
|---|---|
McCoy at Joyce Cartwright's book emporium 2008
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| Born |
Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith 20 August 1943 Dunoon, Scotland |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1965–present |
| Television | Doctor Who (1987–1989, 1996) |
| Website | www |
Sylvester McCoy (born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith: 20 August 1943) is a Scottish actor, best known for playing the seventh incarnation of the Doctor in the long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who from 1987 to 1989—the final Doctor of the original run—and briefly returning in a television film in 1996, as well as for his role as the wizard Radagast the Brown in Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Hobbit.
He was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith in Dunoon, on the Cowal peninsula, to an Irish mother and English father, killed in action in World War II a couple of months before his son was born. His maternal grandmother was from Portadown, Northern Ireland. He was raised religious, but is now an atheist.
He was raised primarily in Dunoon where he attended St. Mun's School. He then studied for the priesthood at Blair's College, a seminary in Aberdeen between the ages of 12 and 16, but he gave this up and continued his education at Dunoon Grammar School. After he left school he moved to London where he worked in the insurance industry for 5 years. He worked in The Roundhouse box office for a time, where he was discovered by Ken Campbell.
He came to prominence as a member of the experimental theatre troupe "The Ken Campbell Roadshow". His best known act was as a stuntman character called "Sylveste McCoy" in a play entitled An Evening with Sylveste McCoy (the name was coined by actor Brian Murphy, part of the Roadshow at the time), where his stunts included putting a fork and nails up his nose and stuffing ferrets down his trousers, and setting his head on fire. As a joke, the programme notes listed Sylveste McCoy as played by "Sylveste McCoy" and, after a reviewer missed the joke and assumed that Sylveste McCoy was a real person, Kent-Smith adopted this as his stage name. Some years later, McCoy added an "r" to the end of "Sylveste", in part because of the actors' superstition that a stage name with thirteen letters was unlucky.
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