- Born
- Died
- Birth nameGrace Jacqueline Hill
- Nickname
- Jackie
- Height1.75 m
- Born in 17 December 1929, Jacqueline Hill was orphaned as a toddler and raised by her grandparents. She was taken out of school at the age of 14 to enable her younger brother to continue. She then worked at Cadbury's, which had an amateur dramatics society. She was encouraged to apply for, and was awarded, a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and entered RADA at the age of 16. She made her stage debut in London's West End in "The Shrike." Many more roles followed, including, on TV, Shop Window, Fabian of the Yard (1954) and An Enemy of the People. It was around this time that she married top director Alvin Rakoff, who cast her opposite Sean Connery in one of ABC TV's Armchair Theatre plays. She was asked to play Barbara Wright in Docteur Who (1963) after she and producer Verity Lambert, whom she knew socially, discussed the role at a party. Soon after leaving the series in 1965 she gave up acting to raise a family. However, she resumed her career in 1979 and gained further TV credits on, amongst other programmes, Romeo & Juliet (1978), Bizarre, bizarre (1979), and the 1980 Docteur Who (1963) story "Meglos" (as a character called Lexa).- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous
- SpouseAlvin Rakoff(1958 - February 18, 1993) (her death, 2 children)
- Her favourite Docteur Who (1963) serials were "The Aztecs" and "The Crusades".
- She and her husband were close neighbours to Richard Briers and Ann Davies. Davies and Hill enrolled in the Open University together after their children were grown up.
- In 1965, took a lengthly hiatus from acting to raise a family.
- Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
- She was played by Jemma Powell in An Adventure in Space and Time (2013).
- By the end of a series one did begin to get very tired, but they would usually try and write the scripts to accommodate you, so that one week Carole Ann or Bill Russell would have more to do, and on occasions they'd even write us out for a couple of weeks so we could dash off for a holiday. We were so on top of each other, in those tiny, tiny studios, that bad tempers would have been a disaster. I got on particularly well with William Russell. He shared my sort of approach to acting and liked to get on with the job with the minimum of fuss. I've worked with him since, doing a lot of rep abroad, in France, and I'm hoping to work with him again soon.
- I was at a party one evening and the usual bunch of friends were there. I'd known Verity Lambert socially since she had joined the ABC television company for whom both my husband and myself had done some work. She was one of Sydney Newman's proteges, and by this stage she had transferred with him to the BBC, where she had been asked to become a producer. Anyway, this party came at just the right point for me, because Verity was in the process of casting the regulars for her new television serial 'Doctor Who'. We talked about it, and shortly afterwards, she offered me the part of Barbara Wright, which I was more than happy to accept. Because of this good beginning, Verity and I always got on well. Making that number of programmes every year meant that it helped to ease the burden of doing so many.
- I think nearby everybody, including the BBC, under-estimated Docteur Who (1963)'s appeal. We had quite long-running contracts which bound us up initially for a year, but which had a number of clauses which meant that they could drop you or the series, or both, whenever they felt like it. So in effect they had the best of both worlds. Looking at the show's durability now, it's a quite amazing phenomenon, although it was an excellent idea, particularly for the time. I think he has managed to last so long because it has this ability to change and develop, it's never the same, so nothing gets too boring or familiar.
- It all goes back to the success of Bill Hartnell as the Doctor, I should imagine, and we always got on well. He would get very annoyed with the way things were done if he thought they were being done the wrong way, but he cared so much about the programme and I think it showed. He particularly enjoyed all the comeback from children, and I grew quite fond of him. I think he was sad when we left. I know I was.
- Carole Ann Ford and I enjoyed a very easy relationship, although we didn't keep in touch after she left the series. She was very busy being a mother and our paths just never seemed to cross. However, I did see her again recently at a Docteur Who (1963) convention and I enjoyed that very much. She's really quite well known at these conventions, I gather, whereas I've only done the one. They're quite amazing. How so many people can still appreciate what we did all those years ago in a tiny black and white studio really astonishes me I suppose it's unique.
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