The Times' obituary for him listed cause of death as cancer.
THANK you! I was wondering if it were listed somewhere. That's what I was curious about. Thanks!
When Big Finish approached him to appear in some of their audios he was looking for more money than any of the Doctors get paid for doing them.
He also wanted script and casting assurances IIRC, that none of the Doctors had. I don't think money was the largest problem they could have got him in to record his role in several stories at once if it was.
It's a shame he never got to do more than the one commentary (for his non-master role in his debut), as it sounds like he enjoyed being paid to chat to co-stars!
I gather he was quite generous to fans who wrote to him for autographs.
That seems to be a common theme I'm seeing here. He was relatively generous to his fans, but demanded superior compensation for his act from his employers. It's interesting. I wonder if that was because he felt he deserved it, and that The Master was as equal, if not
more important a character than The Doctor? Or was it, perhaps, that he wanted to make certain he made the proper amount of budget, as The Master was his
only source of income? And since many have said he was independently wealthy, I would probably lean towards the former.
I never could really get into his Master, but that was more a fault of the writing, not his acting. Roger Delgado was so great...
Yeah, Ainley was good but Delgado was great.
I don't think you can compare them, as they're written as two really different incarnations of The Master. Look at Derek Jacobi, Eric Roberts, John Simm, and Geoffrey Beavers/Peter Pratt. Who or what is The Master? You can say that Delgado defined the role, and thus that's the "proper" was to play The Master. But, then you would have to say that Hartnell's Doctor is the only "right" interpretation. I think both arguments fail equally there.
Delgado was sinister, methodical, and simply one of the best Masters we've seen so far. Ainley was sinister, campy, and a bit OTT. Were either performance simply down to the man? Or wouldn't it be more prudent to say that Delgado's writing took him far more seriously? Compare Ainley and Simms. People
rave about the John Simms Master. But, wasn't he just as OTT as Ainley's?
It's all apples and jelly babies...
I would tend to remember him as one of the 'good guys'.
He could be a bit prickly - the first time I met him I was asking him if there was any chance of an interview, and he started from the assumption that I'd probably been nasty about him in fanzine reviews and wanted proof that I hadn't. But once past that...
And he was somewhat notoriously for only signing his name properly (rather than as AA) if you'd paid for an autographed photo. But...
...at one convention, where he was being very rigourous in charging adult fans for autographs, I saw this terrified kid whose mother had encouraged him to approach The Master and ask if he'd autograph his Target book of [whatever story]. Ainley did it without hesitation, and then found one of the photographs he was autograph-selling, and signed that for the kid as well, no suggestion of charge.
Now THAT is a window into the man right there! Fantastic insight,
diankra. Thanks for sharing that.
As for his passing... I thought it was accepted that (like a lot of actors) there was a bit of difference between his official age, and the real one. So if you add a few years to that offical 71, there's really no reason to speculate on anything beyond natural causes.
And along with the cancer, that makes a lot of sense. I never thought about the age range there. Good points.
