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After a lifetime waiting and hoping to land his dream role, Peter Capaldi thought his chance had passed him by, fearing he was simply too old to play Doctor Who .

Just a few years ago, the star was ready to quit acting and was in such dire financial straits he considered selling his house.

But now the self-confessed Time Lord geek’s roller coaster career has hit new heights as he was revealed as the 12th Doctor this weekend.

For 55-year-old Peter, it is the ­realisation of a dream he has held for decades.

When he became an actor he confided in best friend Bob Morton about his hopes.

Producer Bob, who was best man at Peter’s wedding to wife Elaine, said: “I think he thought it had passed him by. They were casting young actors and he thought he was too old. It is the one role he has dreamed of.”

Indeed, it was Doctor Who that set the young Peter on the road to acting. His upbringing was a million miles away from the showbiz world.

He lived in a run-down Glasgow tenement block and his dad was a door-to-door ice cream salesman.

But his escape was watching Jon Pertwee play the Doctor on Saturday nights and a kindly producer on the show helped open up the world of television to the young Scot.

Peter explained: “When I was a kid I wrote to the BBC and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with Doctor Who scripts.

“I’d never even seen a script and couldn’t believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of

opened a door.”

Peter avidly read the scripts and acted them out to himself and to his family. He developed a passion for the arts early on and combined it with his love of television, even making a replica set of the show Ready, Steady, Go! complete with cardboard cutouts of the Beatles.

But this love of the arts meant it was difficult for Peter to escape the bullies at his tough Glasgow school.

A gawky adolescent, he didn’t fit in at St Ninian’s High School, where sport was the order of the day.

He admitted his teenage years were a “trauma” and said: “My adolescence was a kind of motorway pile-up. I wish I had known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth.

“When I was at school, you couldn’t draw and be into football too. If you were into art, then you were seen as an absolute pansy and there was no way you’d be admitted to the guys’ world of football,” he said.

“At the time, I was quite happy not being a part of it, thank you. Running around with all those brutal boys?”

But it wasn’t only fellow pupils who picked on the isolated teenager.

He said: “Believe it or not, one teacher used to call me a giant spastic for not being able to play football.”

While at school Peter became a member of the Antoine Players, who performed in his local theatre in Bishopbriggs. He later went to Glasgow School of Art.

As the punk movement exploded he formed a band with friend Craig Ferguson called the Dreamboys.

He once joked that they were the only Glasgow band of the time never to be asked to do a session for ­legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

Fast forward many years and Craig is now a big star in the US, hosting one of the top TV chat shows.

And when Peter appeared on the Late Late Show with Craig four years ago, the host jokingly remembered the time they took the hallucinatory drug LSD together. Craig said: “I have ­actually taken acid with my next guest. That’s kind of weird.

“It was 25 years ago we dropped acid. Remember when we took it in Havelock Street that night?

“Do you know if it wore off or are we still tripping?”

Peter said of his wild years: “We did punk music and we were s****. I’m so glad I took the acting route and I’m quite sure Craig’s not complaining about how things worked out either.

“Even though I was the frontman and Craig was the drummer, he’d do all the rock ’n’ roll stuff. Although we were rotten, we had a lot of fun.”

Peter got a job with a greetings card company and then the BBC as a graphic designer after a London drama school turned him down.

But a chance encounter gave him his big break. He arrived back at his Glasgow digs worse for wear after a night out and his costume designer landlady was chatting to director Bill Forsyth, who was casting the film Local Hero, starring Burt Lancaster.

Forsyth impulsively put Peter in a major role and the film proved to be a big hit. “I didn’t know who he was,” Peter recalled. “Maybe he thought I was funny, gawky or idiotic, but ­whatever it was, it was enough.

“That was the way he used to cast – he preferred people he thought were ­interesting. So he lobbed me into a proper film. The only trouble was, I didn’t know what to do next.

“Before Local Hero I’d been knocking about Glasgow in rock bands, drinking too much and generally being 21.

“My opinion of actors was that they were straight and boring, so you see, I was completely unprepared for being one. I went to London and I suppose I thought I’d made it. But I spent the rest of the decade in bedsits. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve no bloody idea what I’m doing here.’ Clueless…”

Peter came close to quitting acting completely as he enjoyed huge highs but his share of long lows.

In 1995 he wrote and directed the Oscar-winning short film, Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life,

and was feted by Hollywood.

He expected his stop-start career to explode but he was abruptly dumped by a legendary producer after a year’s work trying to make the hit short into a full-length movie.

He said: “Hollywood wasn’t interested in me any more. A year after winning the Oscar, almost to the day, I was directing a dog food commercial.

“I was standing in a field in Rickmansworth, close to the M25, up to my knees in mud, looking for the best spot. It was a dog food ad and it couldn’t pay for a location scout. I thought to myself, ‘This is a long way to have fallen’.”

Peter struggled on but 10 years later he was on the verge of giving up. The only roles he won were small parts on TV. It was a hard time for him, wife Elaine, 55, and daughter Cecily, now 16. But as always, they stuck together.

Peter’s marriage is viewed as one of the strongest in showbiz. The couple met on a touring theatre ­production and confessed their love for each other “after a few drinks” on the show’s first night in 1983.

However, Elaine, who now works behind the camera, waited five years to accept his marriage proposal.

It was thanks to her that he did not have to take drastic action when money was tight.

(Image: BBC/Mike Hogan)

Just before he was offered the role of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It in 2005 he was so skint he thought about selling his house. He admitted: “When I first got Tucker, I was on the verge of giving up acting because the business is so fickle.

“One year was so bad for me and my wife that we were going to have to sell our house until Elaine decided to change career and earn some money.

“What I’ve learnt being an actor is that you’ve got to be lucky. I got less lucky and nobody was interested.

“If a part came up it would be for the main corpse’s friend’s brother who was having problems with his marriage.

“Two scenes. You’d have to go up for that and then you wouldn’t get it and then you’d just feel like s***.”

The Thick of It changed Peter’s life. His portrayal of the foul-mouthed political spin doctor won him a clutch of awards and got casting directors calling.

And the one call he wanted, ever since he was a child hiding behind the settee in fear of the Daleks, finally came from his agent, who said: “Hello, Doctor.”

Peter kept the secret, even from his own family. Cecily revealed she was in tears when she finally ­found out about his new iconic role. She said: “It’s pretty amazing. I was crying when I found out.”

But for her dad, it really is a dream come true.