DESMOND DAVIS

(24 May 1926 - 3 July 2021)

The British writer, producer and director Desmond Davis worked for much of his career behind the camera. He was in the British Army film unit from the age of 18, before his apprenticeship as a clapper boy. From 1944 and for the next twenty years he acted as camera loader, focus puller and camera operator on almost sixty British features, often in an uncredited role. From 1956 he worked as a full-time camera operator on Black Tide, Make Mine a Million, The Giant Behemoth and Scream of Fear etc. Director Tony Richardson gave him his first big break on A Taste of Honey in 1961 and he also worked with Richardson on The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Tom Jones. He also assisted John Huston on Freud: The Secret Passion before becoming a director in his own right. His first directorial work was Girl with Green Eyes (1964), an adaptation by Edna O’Brien of her novel The Lonely Girl, starring Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave and Peter Finch. The Uncle (1966), which Davis co-wrote with the novelist Margaret Abrams, was about a seven-year-old boy who becomes an uncle to his young nephew. It starred Rupert Davies and Brenda Bruce and was a charming film that received virtually no release. His third film, I Was Happy Here, was equally good, with Sarah Miles, Cyril Cusack and Sean Caffrey, but then Smashing Time with Tushingham and Redgrave again was a not very funny comedy written by George Melly and set in Swingin’ London. A Nice Girl Like Me (1969), co-written by Davis, starred Barbara Ferris as a girl becoming pregnant in Paris. Davis then embarked on a television career with Follyfoot (1972), The New Avengers, The Country Girls (more Edna O’Brien), Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, Camille, with Greta Scacchi, etc. The only films Desmond Davis directed during this period were Clash of the Titans (1981), an ancient Greek drama with Laurence Olivier, Harry Hamlin and Maggie Smith, and Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (1984) with Donald Sutherland and Faye Dunaway, after which he retired. Desmond Davis, who has died aged 95, married and divorced Shirley Smith. They have a son, Tim

MICHAEL DARVELL