Obituary: Philippa Baker

Philippa Baker, best known as Roma Godolfus in Number 96, has died at age 93.

Born in Sydney, she worked as a librarian to support an income around acting work, before switching to focus solely on acting. She performed in the theatre in Sydney and became known for her radio work, including five years in the ABC serial Blue Hills, playing the part of a Scottish nurse, and 18 months in Doctor Paul.

With the arrival of television, she appeared in early ABC plays including Rose Without A Thorn, The Funnel Web and Family Album and mini-series The Hungry Ones.

She took a break from acting soon after she was married in the early 1960s, citing a loss of interest, but by the end of the decade she found renewed enthusiasm when she returned to television work, making guest appearances in Contrabandits, Division 4, Homicide and The Godfathers. She then landed the role of Russian widow Roma Lubinski in the early days of Number 96. She was surprised to score the part of a Russian Jewish woman aged around 10 years older than herself, and had no idea how to perform a Russian accent. She came up with an accent that she imagined might have been Russian. “I know it’s far from the real thing and I feel there must be a lot of Russian people in Australia who are highly insulted! I think the accent I have adopted is a bit like that of Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she told TV Week in 1973.

The character of Roma was also a welcome departure from some of her previous roles that leaned towards neurotic, long-suffering or uptight characters. “I began to get quite a complex about the type of roles I was given. That’s why playing Mrs Lubinski is so marvellous,” she told TV Week. “It is such a deliciously warm, deep part, that that feeling rubs off and I feel on top of the world all the time.”

With a lot of work by hair and make-up artists to transform her into the more mature Roma (later to become Mrs Godolfus), she was often able to escape being recognised by the public away from the show. “In a way I am luckier than the others in the series because I am, in appearance, far different from Mrs G,” she said. “But when they do recognise me they are very good. Most times they don’t want to intrude. They just want to satisfy their own curiosity.”

Roma and her husband Aldo, played by Johnny Lockwood, were included in the Number 96 movie released in 1974, but were written out of the series in 1975, with the characters killed off by the bomb planted by Maggie Cameron (Bettina Welch). The pair returned to the TEN10 studio in Sydney for the 1000th episode special They Said It Wouldn’t Last in 1976, and again for the curtain call at the end of the final episode in 1977.

Baker went on to feature in the soap opera parody The Checkout Chicks in The Norman Gunston Show — alongside former Number 96 colleagues Candy Raymond, Vivienne Garrett and Abigail — followed by appearances in the ABC drama series Pig In A Poke and Nine Network telemovie Say You Want Me.

She played Mrs Jamieson in five episodes of The Young Doctors and later starred in mini-series The Weekly’s War, Five Mile Creek, The Dirtwater Dynasty and as Dame Enid Lyons in The True Believers.

Source: Nigel Giles, IMDB. TV Times, 14 July 1973, 22 September 1973, 26 April 1975, 18 October 1975. TV Week, 4 August 1973. TV Week Number 96 Special, 1973