Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, the huge peasant monk who exercised sinister and mysterious control over the imperial Russian family just before the Soviet Revolution, has picked up perhaps his first admirer since his death by poisoning, shooting and drowning in 1916. The admirer is Tom Baker, the English actor who plays Rasputin in the movie adaption of Nicholas and Alexandra. The Englishman has a lot in common with the Russian. He is hulking, straggly-bearded and he has hysterical eyes. He was once a monk himself. Baker loves drink, and admits matter-of-factly to hyperactive infatuation with women. It angered him recently when an Englishwoman who had been in St. Petersburg when Rasputin was murdered dismissed him as a smelly old monk.

"You've got to believe in his character," says Baker. "There was something marvelously dangerous about him. He convinced women that you had to be steeped in sin, to put your soul at ease with God when you repented. He practiced as he preached, which is one reason he was so interesting to ladies - he certainly plowed an awful lot of them around the court. The way he dominated the Romanov family, he could hardly have been a bloody slouch. And who knows whether he smelled or not?"

Baker's glossy outline of history accentuates the dramatic. But that is typical of him on the subject of everything, including his own zig-zag course from childhood in Liverpool to the Old Vic - and now, at age 36, to the movies. Who knows where it will end? He longs only for enough money to move his sister, her children and their belongings into the beautiful big house he wants to buy them. On the $65 a week he was earning at the Old Vic, this would have been impossible. On what he stands to clear from a five-picture deal with Sam Spiegel, producer of Nicholas and Alexandra, it can happen easily.

He started at
the Old
Vic as a
horse. In his
first film,
he played
a bear.

Tom was brought up by his mother as a Catholic zealot, though his father was Jewish ("A contradiction in sperms," he says). He volunteered at 16 for a monastery and a life of virtue, because among the people he knew in Liverpool, a priest was a hero. But by the time he was 22, he was so filled with feelings of guilt and imperfection that he constantly demanded to go to confession. On the advice of a Jesuit, he resigned, and soon transferred his obedience from the Church to the army. Now the only way to make life bearable was through "comical masochism." He was the sad sack, "violently keen on KP." He cried for effect during inspection, saluted everybody, wore red slippers on parade - and got such a laugh that he kept on wearing them. Finally, the brass shifted him to feeding the pigs. "I was the village idiot," he says, "whose function was to make people feel good." Drama school - a small one in London - was the next important step - it had lovely gardens and roses for him to tend ("Actually, Kew Gardens near London is my idea of bliss").

Not until he turned 34 did Baker get a chance to channel fantasy to the professional stage. At the Old Vic, Sir Laurence Olivier cast him as Rosinante, Don Quixote's horse - "a clapped-out old bloddy jade," says Baker, "but a famous horse if you had to be one." (It was not to be his only part as an animal. In The Winter's Tale, his first and only movie until this year, he showed up as a bear.)

Like the holy man he portrays in "Nicholas and Alexandra," bachelor Baker enjoys a jolly romp in the hay and a welcome pint. (3rd photo)

Tom Baker as Rasputin PR photo/TB as Rasputin artwork by pattie anne/Article Tavern Photo by: Marvin Lichtner