Random Doctor Who Picture

[purplecat]

Comments

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Fandom tends to forget that Hartnell was playing rather older than he actually was.

[scifirenegade]

There are so many nice "putting on the wig" pictures :D

[mekare]

Thank you for sharing that!

[purplecat]

The wig always seems like a slightly odd choice. Did it make him look older? I wonder what the thinking was.

[purplecat]

It's always a bit of a surprise to be reminded he wore a wig.

[purplecat]

It's a nice photo!

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it was supposed to suggest "old-fashioned"/late Victorian as long hair for men wasn't so fashionable in 1963 (as opposed to a few years later).

[purplecat]

Yes, my first through was "hippie" but that seems totally implausible both given the time frame and the way he is played. Vaguely old-fashioned may be a better hypothesis though, Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, I'm struggling to think of that hair length as typical for men even in the late victorian period - though perhaps its the lack of a beard that is confusing me.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Alfred Lord Tennyson had quite long hair, although not a Hartnell-ey cut. I thought Disraeli had long hair, but it looks like he only had it as a young man, and in ringlets, so not really the same thing.

US President Polk had a somewhat Hartnell-ey similar haircut, although that's 1840s, not late nineteenth century.

I feel there's a really good example that's just escaping my memory...

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

My wife E, who is very into Victoriana, suggests Chopin and Liszt (and also Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but that's not like the first Doctor). She says Liszt's haircut in his older years was very Hartnell-ey!

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I just remembered nineteenth century German Jewish theologian Abraham Geiger!

[purplecat]

I wonder if the intention was to suggest someone vaguely artistic - though it again seems unlikely given how he is framed and played.

Of course it may be that - as a designer in the 1960s you had photos of relatives with that kind of haircut even if its less easy to find them these days or assess how common they may have been.