Harry Baird (12 May 1931 â€" 13 February 2005) was a Guyanese-born British actor who came to prominence in the 1960s.
Life and career
Baird was born in Georgetown, British Guiana and educated in Canada and Britain. He made his first film appearance in 1955 as a boxer called Jamaica in Carol Reed's A Kid for Two Farthings. A year later, he appeared in the play Kismet at the Stoll Theatre in London, and had a role in Jean Genet's The Blacks in 1961.
Baird subsequently appeared mostly in film and television. His first lead role was as Atimbu, in the TV series White Hunter, in 1958. A series of stereotyped roles followed, in low-budget films featuring generic African or "jungle" themes. Baird's most high-profile role, however, came in Michael Relph and Basil Dearden's racial drama film Sapphire (1959). Prominent roles for black actors in Britain remained scarce, although he appeared in supporting roles in the TV series Danger Man and UFO (1970; as Lieutenant Bradley, a role that he left half-way through the series' run).
Baird's only true lead film role was in the 1968 Melvin Van Peebles drama The Story of a Three-Day Pass, in which he played an American soldier who falls in love with a white Parisian woman. Other roles included The Whisperers (1967), The Touchables (1968) (as a gay wrestler named Lillywhite), the horror film The Oblong Box (1969), and The Italian Job (1969) alongside his friend Michael Caine, whose wife, fellow Guyanese actor Shakira Baksh, Baird had appeared alongside in UFO.
In the 1970s, Baird was diagnosed with glaucoma, a condition which ultimately left him blind. He died of cancer in London in 2005.
Selected filmography
- A Kid for Two Farthings (1955)
- Sapphire (1959)
- Offbeat (1961)
- Flame in the Streets (1961)
- Station Six-Sahara (1962)
- The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)
- Thor and the Amazon Women (1963)
- He Who Rides a Tiger (1965)
- The Whisperers (1967)
- The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968)
- The Touchables (1968)
- The Oblong Box (1969)
- The Italian Job (1969)
- Cool It Carol! (1970)
- 1000 Convicts and a Woman (1971)
- Four of the Apocalypse (1975)
- The Count of Monte Cristo (1975)
References
External links
- Harry Baird at the Internet Movie Database