Philippa Baker (actress)

Theatre and radio

After several theatre roles she acted in long-running radio serial Blue Hills, spending five years portraying a Scottish nurse.^[1]

Television

When television broadcasting first arrived in Australia, Baker would appear in television plays by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, later going on to feature in early Crawford Productions serial's Homicide and Division Four, but would become best known when she joined serial Number 96 as Russian emigrant Roma Lubinski early in its run in 1972, becoming part of a comedy double-act with Johnny Lockwood, who played her character's soon-to-be husband Aldo, the deli proprietor. They continued in the series until the end of 1974 when they were abruptly written out of the series, the story became big new's in the media of the time, and was complete with the attacked fan-fare and publicity, but they were returned to the show less-than two months later. The departures of Aldo and Roma had been planned as only a temporary absence all along; press reports of the characters being "dropped" from the show had just all-along being a publicity stunt.

Number 96 Bomb blast

By August 1975, the program's ratings had entered a slump, and a drastic revamp of the show was planned. The writers decided to write out several high-profile characters, including Aldo and Roma. In early September 1975, in one of the series story arcs, for ever known as the Number 96 iconic bomb blast tore through the Number 96 apartment killing four residents, including characters Roma and Aldo. Philippa Baker along with Johnny Lockwood would appear in a documentary the following year to present a segment celebrating the show's 1000 episode retrospective, titled ….And They Said It Wouldn't Last.

In 1976, Baker joined the comedy series The Norman Gunston Show and was featured in a recurring sketch, entitled The Checkout Chicks, which was a parody of melodramatic soap operas set in a supermarket, and mostly featured other former Number 96 actors, including Abigail, Vivienne Garrett, Candy Raymond, Judy Lynne and Anne Louise Lambert.