David Bailie (4 December 1937 – 6 March 2021) was a South African actor, known for his performances on stage, television and film. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked for both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was an associate artist. On TV he played "Dask" in the 1977 '' Doctor Who'' serial ''
The Robots of Death
''The Robots of Death'' is the fifth serial of the 14th season of the British science fiction television series ''Doctor Who'', which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 29 January to 19 February 1977.
In the serial, the Fou ...
'', and also appeared in ''
Blake's 7
''Blake's 7'' (sometimes styled ''Blakes7'') is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. Four 13-episode series were broadcast on BBC1 between 1978 and 1981. It was created by Terry Nation, who also wrote the first ...
''. On film, he played the mute pirate
Cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...
in the ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' series. Bailie was also a professional photographer, specialising in portrait photography. He had a studio in
West Kensington
West Kensington, formerly North End, is an area in the ancient parish of Fulham, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, England, 3.4 miles (5.5 km) west of Charing Cross. It covers most of the London postal area of W14, includ ...
, London.
Personal life
Bailie was born in Springs, South Africa on 4 December 1937, and went to boarding school in Swaziland, before emigrating to Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and ...
) with his family in 1952. His first acting experience soon after school in 1955 was an amateur production of ''
Doctor in the House
''Doctor in the House'' is a 1954 British comedy film directed by Ralph Thomas and produced by Betty Box. The screenplay, by Nicholas Phipps, Richard Gordon and Ronald Wilkinson, is based on the 1952 novel by Gordon, and follows a group of s ...
'', which persuaded him he wanted to be an actor. After leaving school he worked in a bank and then for Central African Airlines. In 1958, he made his first trip from Rhodesia to
Britain
Britain most often refers to:
* The United Kingdom, a sovereign state in Europe comprising the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands
* Great Britain, the largest island in the United King ...
.
Bailie died on 6 March 2021 at the age of 83.
Career
In 1960 he moved to Britain from South Africa} and landed his first small role in the film ''
Flame in the Streets
''Flame in the Streets'' is a 1961 film directed by Roy Ward Baker and based on the 1958 play '' Hot Summer Night'' by Ted Willis. It opened at the Odeon Leicester Square in London's West End on 22 June 1961.
The film depicts an interracial rom ...
Arthur Kopit
Arthur Lee Kopit (' Koenig; May 10, 1937 – April 2, 2021) was an American playwright. He was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for '' Indians'' and '' Wings''. He was also nominated for three Tony Awards: Best Play for ''Indians'' (1970) a ...
's ''
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad
''Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition'' was the first play written by Arthur Kopit.
Background
Kopit was on a postgraduate scholarship from Harvard ...
'' (1961) with
Stella Adler
Stella Adler (February 10, 1901 – December 21, 1992) was an American actress and acting teacher. ''
repertory
A repertory theatre is a theatre in which a resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation.
United Kingdom
Annie Horniman founded the first modern repertory theatre in Manchester after withdrawin ...
in
Barrow-in-Furness
Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of B ...
as juvenile lead – terrified all the while that he would be exposed as totally inexperienced.
Recognising the need for training, he auditioned three times for a bursary to the
RADA
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA; ) is a drama school in London, England, that provides vocational conservatoire training for theatre, film, television, and radio. It is based in the Bloomsbury area of Central London, close to the Se ...
—each time being accepted only as a fee-paying student, which he couldn't afford. He finally sent for the last of his standby money (£200) he had left in Rhodesia and paid for the first term (1963). At the end of term he persuaded John Fernald to allow him free tuition for the next two years.
Terry Hands
Terence David Hands (9 January 1941 – 4 February 2020) was an English theatre director. He founded the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for thirteen years during one of the company's most successful periods; h ...
was also a student at the same time, but had left a little earlier than Bailie and formed the Everyman Theatre with Peter James in Liverpool. On leaving RADA Bailie was invited to join the Everyman in 1964. Amongst other roles he played Tolen in '' The Knack...'', Becket in ''
Murder in the Cathedral
''Murder in the Cathedral'' is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot, first performed in 1935, that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral during the reign of Henry II in 1170. Eliot drew heavily on the writin ...
'', Dion in ''
The Great God Brown
''The Great God Brown'' is a play by Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Nobel Prize in Literature, literature. His poetically titled plays were amon ...
'', MacDuff in '' Macbeth'' and Lucky in '' Waiting for Godot''.
After a year there, he came back to London and auditioned for and was accepted by Sir Laurence Olivier joining the National Theatre. He played minor roles and understudied Olivier in different plays, for instance in ''
Love for Love
''Love for Love'' is a Restoration comedy written by British playwright William Congreve. It premiered on 30 April 1695 at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. Staged by Thomas Betterton's company the original cast included Betterton as Valenti ...
''.
Terry Hands, who had by now joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford-upon-Avon (and later became its artistic director), invited Bailie to join them as an associate artist (1965). There he portrayed "Florizel" opposite
Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia Dench (born 9 December 1934) is an English actress. Regarded as one of Britain's best actresses, she is noted for her versatile work in various films and television programmes encompassing several genres, as well as for her ...
's "Perdita" in ''
The Winter's Tale
''The Winter's Tale'' is a play by William Shakespeare originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, many modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some crit ...
'' along with "Valentine" in ''
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
''The Two Gentlemen of Verona'' is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1589 and 1593. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as showing his first tentative steps in laying ...
'', "The Bastard" in '' King John'', "Kozanka" in ''
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising
''The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising'' (German: ''Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand'') is a 1966 play by German writer Günter Grass. It was premiered at the Berlin Schillertheater on 15 January 1966. In the play, Grass criticizes Bertolt Brech ...
Stomu Yamashta
Stomu Yamashta (or Yamash'ta), born ,
is a Japanese percussionist, keyboardist and composer. He is best known for pioneering and popularising a fusion of traditional Japanese percussive music with Western progressive rock music in the 1960s and 1 ...
at his Red Buddha Theatre. He was cast as the lead in a show called ''Raindog'', requiring him to do everything from singing and dancing, to performing Martial Arts and gymnastics – which he frankly admits was a demand too far and when Yamashta offered him a paltry sum for performing the opportunity was there to depart which he did.
He was then cast by
Michael E. Briant
Michael Edwin Briant (born 14 February 1942) is a retired English television director and author, best known for his work as a director for BBC television drama in the 1970s and 1980s.
Career
At the age of 21 Briant joined the BBC as an assistan ...
in 1976 to play the part of the villain "Dask" in the '' Doctor Who'' serial ''
The Robots of Death
''The Robots of Death'' is the fifth serial of the 14th season of the British science fiction television series ''Doctor Who'', which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 29 January to 19 February 1977.
In the serial, the Fou ...
''. He also played in a number of other series prominent at the time.
For personal reasons Bailie then had a long recess in his acting career. Between 1980 and 1989 he ran a furniture-making business. In 1990 he closed that down and returned to acting, having in fact to virtually restart his career. It didn't help that at exactly this point he had to have a cancer removed from his lip, which required learning to speak again. Whilst awaiting work in the acting field he busied himself with CAD design, self-training and writing computer programs and also doing health and safety work in the building industry.
In the mid-1990s after playing alongside
Brian Glover
Brian Glover (2 April 1934 – 24 July 1997) was an English actor and writer. He worked as a teacher and professional wrestler before commencing an acting career which included films, many roles on British television and work on the stage. His ...
in '' The Canterbury Tales'' he made a comeback in the film business as "Skewer" in ''
Cutthroat Island
''Cutthroat Island'' is a 1995 adventure swashbuckler film directed by Renny Harlin and written by Robert King and Marc Norman from a story by Michael Frost Beckner, James Gorman, Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon. It stars Geena Davis, Matt ...
'' (1995), then played an English Judge in '' The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc'' (1999), and also "The Engineer" in '' Gladiator'' (2000).
Bailie's best-known work in film is the role of "Cotton", a mute pirate who has his tongue cut out, so he trained his parrot, also named Cotton, to speak on his behalf, though it cannot say more than stock phrases. Bailie first appears as Cotton in '' Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl'' (2003) as one of the pirates Jack Sparrow chooses in Tortuga. He is one of the ''Black Pearl'' crewmembers to survive the Kraken attack in the sequel ''
Dead Man's Chest
"Dead Man's Chest" (also known as "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest" or "Yo, Ho, Ho (And a Bottle of Rum)") is a fictional''Fictional sea-song'' - in this sense means a sea-song that first appeared in a work of fiction, and not an authentic se ...
'' (2006), and also played Cotton in the third instalment: '' At World's End'' (2007). His character did not say a single line in the three films. According to Bailie, he found it to be a problem and proposed to director Gore Verbinski and writer Terry Rossio a storyline that Cotton was able to speak, but it was not included in films.
In 2014, David joined the ensemble cast of
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
-
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
short Artificio Conceal for the role of Vitruvius. The film, written and directed by
Ayoub Qanir Ayoub is the Arabic name of the biblical figure Job.
Ayoub or Ayyoub or Ayub or Ayoob and other variants is also a given name and a surname. Eyüp is the Turkish variant of the same name. Ejub is the Bosnian variant of the same name.
Given name A ...
, was selected to film festivals worldwide including
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Festival (; french: link=no, Festival de Cannes), until 2003 called the International Film Festival (') and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films o ...
's ''Short Film Corner '',
Edinburgh International Film Festival
The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is a film festival that runs for two weeks in June each year. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival. EIFF presents both UK and international films (all ti ...
and
Seattle International Film Festival
The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), held annually in Seattle, Washington since 1976, is among the top film festivals in North America. Audiences have grown steadily; the 2006 festival had 160,000 attendees. The SIFF runs for more th ...
.
Bailie reprised his ''Doctor Who'' role as Dask in the Kaldor City audio drama series. He was also involved in Big Finish Productions audio dramas playing the "
Celestial Toymaker
The Celestial Toymaker is a fictional character in the long-running British science fiction television series, '' Doctor Who''. He was played by Michael Gough, and featured in the 1966 story ''The Celestial Toymaker'' by Brian Hayles.
Characte ...
".
Bailie also worked as a professional photographer, portraiture and landscapes being his speciality.
He established a YouTube channel, ''mdebailes'', where he uploaded readings and performance excerpts.