Peter Davison

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0205749/
Peter Davison (I)
Date of birth (location): 13 April 1951, Streatham, London, England, UK
Biography for  Peter Davison (I)
Birth name: Peter Moffett
Height: 6' 1" (1.85 m)

Mini biography

Peter Moffett, now better known by his stage name Peter Davison, was born on 13 April 1951 in the Streatham area of London. In 1961, he and his family - parents Sheila and Claude (an electrical engineer who hailed from British Guiana) and his sisters Barbara, Pamela and Shirley - moved to Woking in Surrey, where Davison was educated at the Maphill School. It was here that he first became interested in acting, taking parts in a number of school plays, and this eventually led to him joining an amateur dramatic society, the Byfleet Players.

On leaving school at the age of sixteen, having achieved only modest academic success with three O Levels of undistinguished grades, he took a variety of short-lived jobs ranging from hospital porter to Hoffman press operator. He was still keen to pursue an acting career, however, and so applied for a place at drama school. He was accepted into the Central School of Speech and Drama and stayed there for three years.

Davison's first professional acting work came in 1972 when, after leaving drama school in the July of that year, he secured a small role in a run of "Love's Labour's Lost" at the Nottingham Playhouse. This marked the start of a three-year period in which he worked in a variety of different repertory companies around the UK, often in Shakespearean roles. He then made his television debut, playing a blond-wigged space cowboy character called Elmer in "A Man for Emily", a three-part story in the Thames TV children's series "The Tomorrow People" (1973), transmitted in April 1975.

Appearing alongside him in this production was his future wife, American-born actress Sandra Dickinson, whom he had first met during a run of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Edinburgh. They married on 26 December 1978 in Dickinson's home town of Rockville in Maryland, USA. Davison spent the following eighteen months working as a file clerk at Twickenham tax office. He also took the opportunity to pursue an interest in singing and song-writing, which led him to record several singles with his wife. He later provided the theme tunes for a number of TV series, including "Mixed Blessings" (1978) and "Button Moon" (1980).

Davison played the romantic lead, Tom Holland in "Love for Lydia" (1978) (mini), a London Weekend Television (LWT) period drama serial transmitted in 1977. His greatest acting success came when he played Tristan in the BBC's "All Creatures Great and Small" (1978), based on the books of country vet James Herriot, a highly successful series, which ran initially for three seasons between 1978-1980. His success in "All Creatures Great and Small" brought him many other offers of TV work. Amongst those that he took up were lead roles in two sitcoms: LWT's "Holding the Fort" (1980), in which he played Russell Milburn, and the BBC's "Sink or Swim" (1980), in which he played Brian Webber.

Three seasons of each were transmitted between 1980 and 1982, consolidating Davison's position as a well-known and popular television actor. He announced he was taking the lead role in "Doctor Who" (1963) on the BBC's lunchtime magazine programme "Pebble Mill at One", on 3 December 1980, when he discussed with the presenter a number of costume ideas sent in by viewers and was particularly impressed by a suggestion from one of a panel of young fans assembled in the studio that the new Doctor should be 'like Tristan Farnon, but with bravery and intellect'.

His appearance in "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" (1981) (mini), was recorded on 19 December 1980 and transmitted on 2 February 1981, by which time the viewing public were well aware that he would soon be taking over the lead role in Doctor Who. There was in fact only a month to go before he would make his on-screen debut in the series - albeit a brief one, in the regeneration sequence at the end of "Logopolis". His first full story was in "Castrovalva", the first story of season nineteen transmitted on 4 January 1982. His final story was season twenty-one's story "The Caves of Androzani". The final episode of this story was transmitted on 16 March 1984.

He became a father when on Christmas day 1984 his wife gave birth to a daughter, Georgia Elizabeth, at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London. Ten years later, however, his marriage to Dickinson broke down and they separated. Although he has taken occasional roles in theatre, radio and film, most of the actor's work has been in the medium for which he is best known: television.

His credits have included regular stints as Henry Myers in "Anna of the Five Towns" (1985) (mini), as Dr. Stephen Daker in "A Very Peculiar Practice" (1986), as Albert Campion in "Campion" (1989) and as Clive Quigley in "Ain't Misbehavin" (1994) all for the BBC, and as Ralph in Yorkshire TV's "Fiddlers Three" (1991). In addition, he has reprised his popular role of Tristan Farnon on a number of occasions for one-off specials and revival seasons of "All Creatures Great and Small".

He has also returned several times to the world of Doctor Who. In 1993 he appeared as the fifth Doctor in "Dimensions in Time", a brief two-part skit transmitted as part of the BBC's annual Children in Need Charity appeal, and in 1985 he narrated an abridged novelisation of the season twenty-one story "Warriors of the Deep" for BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who audio book series. In addition, he has appeared in a number of video dramas produced by Bill Baggs Video. In 2003 and 2004 he appeared as quiet and unassuming detective 'Dangerous' Davies in "The Last Detective" (2003), the Meridian TV adaptations of Leslie Thomas's novels.

Spouse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Davison
Peter Davison
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Peter Davison (born April 13, 1951) is a British actor, best known for his roles as Tristan to Robert Hardy's Siegfried in All Creatures Great and Small and as the fifth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, which he played from 1981 to 1984.

Davison was born Peter Moffett in London, his father being originally from Guyana. He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and appeared in several stage productions and some minor television roles before he got his big break in 1978. His performance as the ne'er-do-well Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small made him a household name. He married American actress Sandra Dickinson in the same year, but they eventually divorced in 1994. He and Dickinson had previously appeared together in an episode of the television series The Tomorrow People (1975) and together composed and performed the theme tune to Button Moon, a children's programme broadcast in the 1980s. He made a cameo appearance alongside Dickinson as the Dish of the Day in the television version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), whose producers considered it humorous for an actor known for playing a veterinary surgeon to appear as a cow. Davison also appeared in some British sitcoms, including Holding the Fort, Sink or Swim and Ain't Misbehavin', as well as appearing in dramatic roles.

In 1981, Davison signed a contract to play the Doctor for three years, succeeding Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor). Attracting such a high-profile actor was as much of a coup for the programme's producers as getting the role was for him, but he did not renew his contract because he feared being typecast. Reportedly, Patrick Troughton (who had played the Second Doctor) had recommended to Davison that he leave the role after three years, and Davison followed his advice.

It was not until 1986 that Davison worked on another very popular series. He played Dr Stephen Daker, the ingenuous hero of A Very Peculiar Practice, written by Andrew Davies. The surreal comedy-drama was revived several years later as A Very Polish Practice. Davison also played the lead in Campion, a series based on the period whodunnits of Margery Allingham. This, and the opportunity to play Tristan Farnon again in 1985 and 1990, kept Davison busy until the early 1990s, when he gradually faded from the public eye. He continued to appear occasionally on television, including an appearance on the American show Magnum, P.I., but it was not until 2000 that he returned in another major role, that of David Braithwaite in At Home with the Braithwaites.

In 1999 he appeared as the outgoing headteacher in Hope And Glory.

He has also starred in the television series The Last Detective (2003-date) and Distant Shores (2005) for ITV, the latter where he coincidentally also played a doctor. His daughter with Dickinson, Georgia Moffett, is also an actress (who allegedly auditioned for the role of Rose Tyler, the current companion of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors).

Davison returned to play the Doctor in the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. He has also reprised the role in a series of audio plays by Big Finish Productions.

Davison is reported to make a guest appearance in the second series of the BBC Radio 4 science fiction comedy series Nebulous, due to be broadcast in Spring 2006.

http://www.tv.com/peter-davison/person/3322/biography.html
Peter Davison
In 1961, Peter, parents Sheila and Claude, and his sisters Barbara, Shirley and Pamela, moved to Woking. Davison first became interested in acting at school when he took part in school plays. He then joined the Byfleet Players, an amateur dramatic society.

Peter left school at 16 with three O levels and took jobs varying from hospital porter to file clerk in the Tax Office. He was accepted into the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he stayed until 1972.

Upon leaving Drama school, Peter worked for three years in repatory theatre. He met Sandra Dickinson during a run of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975 and they married in 1978. His daughter, Georgia, was born in 1984 and he split with Dickinson in 1993.

As well as acting, Peter Davison has also dabbled in songwriting and has provided the themes to 'Button Moon' and 'My Hero.'

Davison is currently living with partner Elizabeth Morton and they have two sons, Louis and Joel.

Trivia:

Quotes:

Weekend, Daily Mail, Saturday, 26th August 2006
Georgia on my mind
Photographs: Mike Lawn, ITV / Andy McCartney
In his latest TV role, actor PETER DAVISON plays the perfect dad - until everything goes horribly wrong. It's a painful reminder of his own failings as a parent, especially when his 16-year-old daughter told him she was pregnant. He tells REBECCA HARDY why he still worries for her

Actor Peter Davison likes to wonder who's writing the script for him. 'If my life had been normal,' he muses, 'I'd be looking forward to taking things easy now  and contemplating nothing more exciting than a Saga cruise. As it is, I'm heavily immersed in the fun of nursery and infant school life for my own boys and my grandson.'

Charming and laid-back, he is 55 now and on his third marriage. He was first wed at 21 — to teacher Diane Russell — and thought they'd be together happily ever after. But it didn't work out like that. Then came marriage to actress Sandra Dickinson and, for nearly two decades, they were perceived as TV's golden couple. They had a daughter, Georgia, now an actress, who in turn has given him a four-year-old grandson, Ty. Sadly, his public togetherness with Sandra became a sham, ending in screaming rows and nastiness. Today, they don't speak, which, he says, is not ideal for Georgia.

Now, he lives with his third wife, writer Elizabeth Morton — who is ten years younger — and their sons, Louis, six, and Joel, four, in a colourful, chaotic house near Twickenham, Middlesex. Children keep you young, of course, and Peter certainly seems to be holding back the years. 'Sometimes I feel like an old codger,' he admits. 'But, when I look back at what I was like when I was young, I realise that I had so many definite opinions about things, but I spouted a lot of rubbish.'

He is more rounded now. Positive without being dogmatic. 'You realise that life isn't black and white. There are many grey areas.'

Peter dotes upon Georgia and worried dreadfully when, at 16, she discovered she was pregnant. She blamed it on taking antibiotics with the Pill. Peter blamed it upon himself.

'I certainly questioned whether it was to do with what had happened to her — the divorce, that kind of thing. Georgia was 15 when Elizabeth and I had Louis. She was there at the hospital when he was born. I sensed she needed reassurance about her place in the scheme of things. I put my arm around her and said, "You're my first child."

'I've got no idea if her pregnancy was a reaction to that [feeling usurped by his second family]. I've been all through this, asking if there may have been an element of that. Georgia said, "Absolutely not." She was very insistent that it had been an accident. Obviously, you ask the question of yourself, but, in the end, it kind of doesn't matter.'

Peter is the sort of self-effacing man who prefers to trip through life without attracting fuss or attention. He has made a career of playing gentle, modest types such as Tristan in All Creatures Great And Small and Detective Constable 'Dangerous' Davies in The Last Detective. Personally, I never found him eccentric or loud enough to convince as Doctor Who, a role he played from 1981 to 1984.

When we meet, Peter is inconspicuously dressed in chinos and a cotton shirt. In fact, he's so inconspicuous that, despite his face being plastered   across our television sets for almost three decades, nobody seems to recognise him. I suspect he rather likes it that way. Peter is soon to appear in ITV's The Complete Guide To Parenting in which he plays George Huntley, a professor of child psychology who has to take on the role of looking after his seven-year-old son when his wife moves to Paris to take up a job .

'He thinks he knows how to bring up children, making lists and drawing up a timetable,' Peter says. 'But, of course, every child is different; you can't even start to order them all in the same way. And, of course, it all goes horribly wrong. As a parent you never do it well, do you? You just do the best you can and hope it's all right.'

Peter was filming At Home With The Braithwaites, about television's favourite dysfunctional family, when he learned of Georgia's pregnancy. 'It was the weird thing of life imitating art,' he says. 'I was doing a series where my [on-screen] daughter had just got pregnant and the next thing I got a phone call from Elizabeth saying, "Georgia's going to ring in a minute or so. She's got something to tell you, but she wants me to tell you first. She's pregnant." It was bizarre.'

Georgia was four months pregnant. She met the baby's father, who no longer sees Ty, in Oxford where he had a holiday job as a waiter. By the time she knew she was pregnant, the six-month affair was over. She went alone to the hospital for a scan and came home with a picture of the growing baby. The following day she tossed it at Sandra, saying, "Please don't kill me for this."

Sandra didn't believe in abortion and it was an emotional moment because, in the last few years of their marriage, she had been desperate to have another child. She became obsessive and depressed, and her grief and attempts at IVF dominated their lives.

'Georgia insists it was absolutely her decision to have the baby,' says Peter. 'When she told me, she thought I was going to be cross with her. I wasn't — I was just disappointed for her that she might miss out on that period of her life where she might go travelling, might do this, that and the other. I'm still concerned that she never did that. She's had to grow up really quickly and has had to take on the responsibility of having a child, with everything that entails. If her friends go out on a Saturday night and she can't get a babysitter, then she can't go with them.

'When she first told me, I subtly said, "Fine, but just think about it. Make sure it's what you want to do.'" Did he worry she was being encouraged by Sandra to have the child? 'Yes,' he says. 'But I never for a second said that she should not have it. I just asked her to take a deep breath and make sure this is what she wanted to do.

'All I wanted was to make sure she had a doorway out. I didn't push her. I didn't care what anyone thought — all I knew was that I wasn't ashamed or embarrassed, because the only person whose feelings mattered at this crucial time was Georgia. If she went ahead with the pregnancy, it would be taking an enormous step — but, in the end, only she could decide.

'The problem is, you can't even think of the consequences of having a child. Elizabeth herself had no idea, so how on earth could Georgia, at 16, know how it would impact upon every single day of her life?'

Peter's own childhood was ordinary, conventional, defined by fixed bedtimes and Sunday school. Born in 1951 in Streatham, south London, he was the only boy in a family of four children and doesn't remember talking very much to his own father.

'I was very attached to my mother,' he says. 'My father was sort of passive. He'd play with me a lot, but I couldn't imagine sitting down and talking to him if I had a problem.

'It was a matriarchal household. My mother was quite strict. If she threatened something, she'd see it through. I never told my parents I loved them and they never told me.

'I did when my dad was dying, and it made me feel better. Imagine if, when your parents die, you'd never said something like that. When I said it I did feel a connection but I'm not sure if it was a real one, because he wasn't compos mentis — but he did squeeze my hand.

'There's no doubt that when I went to see him he knew I was there. He died a week before Louis was born. I have fears about my relationship with my sons in terms of talking to them because of my relationship with my own father.

'I feel now with my boys that I do what my father did with me. I chase them around. Grab them. Throw them on chairs. My father didn't do that thing of putting his arm around me and saying, "I love you son. Well done."

'With my daughter I can talk to her about things. She was born three minutes into Christmas Day, 1984. I just remember her coming out completely silent. She was the most precious thing. I just looked at her — looked at her eyes moving round. I used to spend two or three hours just playing with her. We'd play a game where we'd pack a suitcase, get in a taxi, go to the airport, check-in at a hotel, have dinner — and all on the landing at home.'

Peter met Sandra through acting. A man who seems to be more of a passenger in life than a driver, he happened into acting because he'd done hopelessly in his school exams. He was married to his childhood sweetheart Diane when he appeared in a play in Edinburgh with Sandra. She was married, too, to a British cell biologist studying for his PhD in the U.S.

'I'd married at 21, which is quite young,' he says. 'I tell you what it really was. In those days, if you checked into a hotel with your girlfriend, you almost had to write Mr and Mrs Smith. I suppose I got married so there wouldn't be a problem sleeping with her — my wife was the first girl I slept with.

'It was rather a silly reason — not based upon being with the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It was a kind of mistake. From start to finish it lasted two or three years.'

Peter had been married to Sandra for five years when Georgia was born. Home was a splendid mansion in Berkshire with eight bedrooms and five bathrooms, and television roles came thick and fast for the two of them. They appeared to have the perfect relationship, but Peter felt dominated and stifled. When Georgia was eight, he felt he had to get out and moved to a flat in Belsize Park, north-west London.

'Leaving Georgia was really tough,' he says. 'I had to tell her. I was driving her back from a friend's house when I said I was moving out. She just said, "Oh, okay." She didn't ask anything about it. It's kind of bizarre that — apart from when I told her — we never talked about the divorce.

'I was very wary of saying anything bad about Sandra to her. I knew it would be a mistake if I started slagging her off. Georgia would be telling me off for it now.'

It must have been hard to hold his tongue. He had no money, a tiny flat and, for the only period in his career, little work. To cap it all, he was hit with a £90,000 tax bill. He was paying £30,000 a year maintenance, but still Sandra pressed for increased financial support. She also claimed that she had been the one to walk out on him. 'I made the decision to divorce him ten years ago,' she said at the time.

'I saw Georgia all the time — obsessively,' says Peter. "There were no problems with access, but I sometimes wonder if that was because Sandra thought it was causing me more problems than not. Perhaps she thought it was screwing up my bachelor lifestyle.

'The year after we separated, Georgia went to boarding school. It was her choice. Then it wasn't so bad. I didn't feel so absent from the marital home.' Peter had a few wild bachelor years and then he met Elizabeth. She was the first girlfriend he introduced to Georgia, who warned him, 'Don't screw this up.'

Elizabeth is a relaxed, undemanding woman. 'Which is actually brilliant,' says Peter. 'I end up following her around the whole time.'

Peter had shied away from commitments since his divorce from Sandra, and when he met Elizabeth, who was an actress at the time, their relationship was kept light-hearted and fun. Then, one day, Elizabeth came home and told him she was pregnant. 'She said, "I'm not sure you're going to like this." But it was fine. Then, four months into the pregnancy, we found out the baby had died. Because she'd lost it, it then became imperative to have a baby. I said we'd try again — even though we hadn't tried the first time.' Joel followed two years after Louis, a few months before Peter's grandson. He resisted marriage for a third time until three years ago. 'We had the children, then we had the honeymoon, and then we got married,' he says. 'Completely back to front.'

Finally, Peter seems to have found a happy ever after. 'My marriage is pretty fantastic,' he says. I don't go out at all now. I'm very happy to stay in. All I want to do is come home and sit on the sofa with Elizabeth, watching television after we've put the children to bed.'  This thoroughly ordinary life seems to suit Peter. Georgia, too, is settled with a nanny and a home of her own. Currently, father and daughter are filming a comedy for the BBC, Fear, Stress And Anger, in which Georgia plays Peter's daughter. Again, art imitates life — black, white and grey.

The Complete Guide To Parenting is on September 11, ITV1, at 10pm.

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