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Waris Hussein directed An Unearthly Child, the first broadcast Doctor Who television story. He also directed all but one of the seven episodes of Marco Polo.
Biography
Waris Hussein was born on 9th December 1938 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, moving with his parents to London when he was 9 years old. He attended Cambridge and worked as a trainee at the BBC, where his mother, Attia Hussein, was a newsreader and dramatic star. When he became a director, he was the first Asian BBC Drama director there'd ever been. According the Waris, he had to put up with a lot of "innuendo" and gossip about how he'd got to do what he was doing. He could feel himself being stared at and it made him determined not to fail.
He was crucial to the casting of William Hartnell as the Doctor, and he felt Bill had the eccentric quality that they needed for the part. Waris was part of the group that went for lunch with him, to try and convince him to accept the role. When he first met Bill, he felt terrible because he thought Bill was a "...very opinionated man - that is, prejudiced", and he felt he was looked down upon because he was an Asian "kid", although none of this was spoken between them. Later Waris got on very well with Bill.
Waris was a very close friend of Diane Cilento (former wife of Sean Connery) and met Sean just after Dr. No had been released.
He was director of the Pilot Episode, which had many differences to the final version. After Sydney Newman saw the pilot, he took Waris and Verity Lambert (producer) out to dinner, told them he thought it was terrible, and gave them another chance at the episode, so they went and made An Unearthly Child. Waris tried to forget the pilot, as he thought it was so terrible that people would fall asleep while watching it.
His next Doctor Who association was in the story Marco Polo, in which he directed six of the seven episodes. He had a self-proclaimed strange imagination and, in one of the scenes, wanted to have a dwarf on an actor's shoulder, which was eventually substituted with a spider-monkey.
Other credits
In addition to his work on Doctor Who, Hussein has also directed the theatrical films, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972), the television movies Daphne Laureola (1978), Little Gloria... Happy at Last (1982), Princess Daisy (1983), The Winter of Our Discontent (1983), Copacabana (1985), The Face on the Milk Carton (1995), and Her Best Friend's Husband (2002), among others. He has also written the television movies Days in the Trees (1967) and St. Joan (1968). Prior to his career behind the camera, Mr. Hussein had one acting credit, appearing in an episode of Corrigan Blake in 1962.
Mr. Hussein continues to direct and produce in the UK, the US, and his native India.