Simon Fisher-Becker 1961-2025 R.I.P.
Simon was a character actor with extensive experience across the whole spectrum of the industry, having performed everything from Shakespeare to Panto. He was perhaps best known for playing Dorium Maldovar in Dr Who and The Fat Friar in the Harry Potter films.
Simon served as AWL Chairman from 2002 to 2004, then as Secretary 2004-05.
I worked with Simon for the first time in 1989, on the set of a commercial for gas central heating. After that we’d meet for lunch, and on another photo shoot in Amsterdam with Anna Karen, who Simon invited to do one of his murder mysteries with us. It never occurred to me she’d say yes. Anna and her husband Terry became a fixture.
It was typical of Simon’s outgoing nature to embrace every opportunity. He was a great keeper intoucher, and he never said no to any gig. We worked together again in 2002 on a double bill at the Etcetera Theatre. Paddy Gormley’s ’Hamlet, Tragedy of a Fat Man’, and me in an adaptation of Camus’ The Fall, with Kirsty Bennett. Simon was irrepressibly upbeat.
And he was trusted. The scene in Doctor Who which begins with Dorium waving away the guns of the henchmen either side of him; that touch was Simon’s idea. Very Sydney Greenstreet.
In later years, with impaired mobility, he kept busy with The Hawk Chronicles podcast (with which he was kind enough to get me involved), his Vlogs and as co-chair on The No Name Trivia Show, with Joseph Mcgrail-bateup.
When I last spoke to Simon in hospital, where he’d been for two months, I said you must be so bored. Oh no, he said, I’m not bored at all. I have so many ideas.
Clive Ward
I have every reason to be grateful to Simon. After seeing some of my work at AWL, he asked me to write a one-man show for him. To my delight, he produced the resulting play, Hamlet, Tragedy of a Fat Man, which ran at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden for a month in the summer of 2002, and then toured extensively.
The inspiration was the thought of Simon’s character, desperate to overcome the casting stigma of ’fattism’, practising lines from Hamlet with a Hamlet-minus-one tape of his own making. This was my first of my plays to reach the professional stage.
Then I watched in awe as his career took off, first with the casting as The Fat Friar in Harry Potter and then as The Blue Man in Doctor Who.
Farewell, old friend.
Paddy Gormley
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