Mr. Gibson Bill Paterson Mr. Gibson is the kindly doctor whose marriage to the beautiful yet shallow widow Mrs. Kirkpatrick gives his 17-year-old daughter Molly the new mother she never asked for. "Quite early on, you see his predicament," says actor Bill Paterson. "He is a widowed father striving to bring up his daughter properly. And yet he makes the understandable mistake of marrying the wrong person. It's not a marriage from hell; it's just that Mrs. Gibson wants a type of life that doesn't suit him." Whatever his misgivings about his marriage, Mr. Gibson finds continued comfort in Molly. "Being a father, I instantly understood the warmth between the father and the daughter," said Paterson. "When she gets to the stage of moving away from him and entertaining suitors, you can feel the tension in him. He wants the best for her, but doesn't want to lose her. Any parent will understand that." Celebrated actor Bill Paterson has appeared in two previous ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre productions, starring as Jack Lithgow in Traffik and as Blackpool in Charles Dickens's Hard Times.