ANTHONY HARVEY

(3 June 1930 - 23 November 2017)

Following a single film acting appearance as a child – playing Ptolemy in Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) – the British film director Anthony Harvey, who has died at the age of 87, began his career as an editor. From the 1950s he was with the Boulting brothers on such films as Private’s Progress, Brothers In Law, Happy Is the Bride, Carlton-Browne of the F.O. and I’m All Right Jack. He edited Anthony Asquith’s The Millionairess, then Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, co-written and co-produced by Bryan Forbes for whom he also edited The L-Shaped Room and The Whisperers. For Stanley Kubrick, Harvey edited Lolita and Dr Strangelove and he worked with Martin Ritt on The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Dutchman was Harvey’s first film as a director in 1966, an adaptation of a play by Amiri Baraka, with Shirley Knight. He directed Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, which won three Oscars (Harvey was nominated too) and he also worked with O’Toole on the TV movie of Svengali and with Hepburn again on a TV adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, on the film Grace Quigley and for television This Can’t Be Love, Harvey’s final work in 1994. Other films directed by Harvey include They Might Be Giants with George C. Scott, The Abdication and Richard’s Things, both with Liv Ullmann, Players and the Western Eagle’s Wing. His other TV work included The Disappearance of Aimee with Faye Dunaway and Bette Davis, and the US sequences of The Patricia Neal Story, with Glenda Jackson.

MICHAEL DARVELL