HUGH WHITEMORE

(16 June 1936 - 17 July 2018)

Although he trained to be an actor at Rada, Hugh Whitemore, who has died at the age of 82, became a playwright and a screenwriter for both television and film. He began writing for television in 1962 with a story for No Hiding Place, followed by The Full Chatter with Brian Rix, the BBC soap Compact and many more series such as Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play, Elizabeth R, adaptations of Somerset Maugham stories, David Copperfield, Moll Flanders, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, A Dance to the Music of Time, Cider With Rosie, etc. For the theatre he wrote Breaking the Code, about Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, A Pack of Lies, on the Kroger spy ring, The Best of Friends, about George Bernard Shaw, Stevie, on the poet and novelist Stevie Smith, A Letter of Resignation with Edward Fox as Harold Macmillan, It’s Ralph, with Timothy West, Sand in the Sandwiches about John Betjeman, and an adaptation of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me. For the cinema, his first contributions were additional scenes for an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall… of a Birdwatcher in 1968. Then came All Neat in Black Stockings, Man at the Top, the sequel to John Braine’s novel, The Blue Bird, from the Maeterlinck play, with (disastrously) Elizabeth Taylor, The Return of the Soldier with Alan Bates and Julie Christie, 84 Charing Cross Road, and Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, with Charlotte Gainsbourg. Whitemore’s last work was all for TV: an episode of Midsomer Murders, the Emmy-winning The Gathering Storm, with Albert Finney as Churchill, My House in Umbria, from the William Trevor novel, with Maggie Smith (another Emmy), and Into the Storm (2009) with Brendan Gleeson as Churchill. Hugh Whitemore was married three times and has a son, Thomas, from his second marriage.

MICHAEL DARVELL