Maurice Cass - the Proto-Doctor Who.

 

I've just been watching a movie with Lithuanian actor Maurice Cass as Prof. Newton, and it struck me how in terms of his clothes and even hair style, he could almost be a precursor for William Hartnell as Dr Who. In the movie, he even adopts the same gesture of clutching the lapels of his coat with two hands.

While Maurice Cass’s Professor Newton looks strikingly like Hartnell’s Doctor — white hair, coat, lapel-clutching — the resemblance is almost certainly coincidental. Both drew from the same cultural stock character: the eccentric elder scientist.

Hartnell’s costume was consciously Edwardian, designed by BBC staff, not borrowed from Cass. But Cass’s Newton can be seen as a proto‑Doctor figure, showing how mid‑century sci‑fi already had the visual vocabulary that Hartnell would later immortalize.