Roy Ward Baker: Marilyn Monroe & Bette Davis + ‘Titanic’ Movie Director Has Died

Marilyn Monroe in Roy Ward Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock.

Roy Ward Baker, best known for directing Marilyn Monroe in her first dramatic lead, Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), opposite Richad Widmark and Anne Bancroft; for the well-regarded 1958 Titanic drama A Night to Remember, starring Kenneth More; and for handling an eyepatched Bette Davis as a anally retentive matriarch in The Anniversary (1968), died on Oct. 5. Ward Baker (born on Dec. 16, 1914, in London) was 93.

Among the filmmaker’s other efforts – many of which for Hammer – are the sci-fier Quatermass and the Pit / Five Million Years to Earth (1967), with Andrew Keir as Professor Quatermass; Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971), in which Ralph Bates is turned into Martine Beswick; and the omnibus horror/sci-fier Asylum (1972), with an all-star cast that included Peter Cushing, Britt Ekland, Barbara Parkins, Charlotte Rampling, Herbert Lom, Richard Todd, and Sylvia Syms.

On television, Ward Baker directed episodes for some of the best known British series, including The Saint and The Avengers.