Thomas Baptiste (17 March 1929 – 6 December 2018) was a Guyanese-born British actor and opera singer.
His one contact was the Labour MP Tom Driberg, who helped him gain factory employment, and Baptiste enrolled at Morley College in Lambeth to study music followed by scholarships to the National School of Opera and Royal Academy of Music.
[1] Baptiste appeared in a production of Noël Coward's Nude with Violin for two years from 1956 with John Gielgud, Patience Collier and Kathleen Harrison, first in Dublin and then the West End.
In 1963, Baptiste played the first Black character to appear in Coronation Street, a bus conductor who was falsely sacked as a result of a racist altercation with Len Fairclough.
[1] In an interview which appeared in 1992, Baptiste said that he thought black actors were having even more difficulty beginning their careers than he had done forty years earlier.