Philip Saville

Philip Saville, born Philip Saffer on 28 October 1927 in Marylebone, London, was a British actor, director, and screenwriter whose career spanned half a century. His father, Louis Saffer, was a travelling salesman for a clothing company who adopted the anglicized surname Saville, a name originally chosen by his grandfather Joseph Saffer, a master tailor. His mother, Sadie Kathleen, known as Kay, née Tanenberg, worked as a supervisor of Fortnum & Mason's women's fashion department in Piccadilly. Saville studied science at London University before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals was cut short when a serious knee injury involving an armoured vehicle led to his discharge. He died on 22 December 2016.

Saville began his career as an actor, appearing on Broadway in 1949 in The Shop at Sly Corner. His screen acting credits from the late 1940s and 1950s include To the Public Danger (1948), Penny and the Pownall Case (1948), Murder at 3am (1953), The Straw Man (1953), Bang! You're Dead (1954), The Night of the Full Moon (1954), Contraband Spain (1955), The Great Van Robbery (1957), The Betrayal (1957), On the Run (1958), Three Crooked Men (1958), and An Honourable Murder (1959), in which he played Mark Anthony.

From the 1950s onward, Saville transitioned into directing, concentrating primarily on television. He contributed to more than 40 productions for ABC's Armchair Theatre anthology series between 1956 and 1972, helping to develop the innovative visual style for which the series became known, including rapid and intricate camera movements during frequently live productions. His 1960 Armchair Theatre production of Harold Pinter's A Night Out was among his early directorial credits for the series. In 1963 he directed Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, a production notable for featuring folk singer Bob Dylan in his first acting role, whom Saville had brought to Britain specifically to appear in the play. The production has since been lost.

Saville's 1964 BBC production of Hamlet at Elsinore was a landmark in television history, pioneering the use of videotape for location recording. That same year he directed an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit for The Wednesday Play. His 1966 adaptation of the E. M. Forster short story The Machine Stops for Out of the Unknown won the main prize at the 1967 Trieste international science fiction film festival. He directed a film version of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off in 1966 and Oedipus the King in 1968.

Among his most celebrated later television work, Saville directed Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982 and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil in 1986, both of which won BAFTAs for Best Drama Series. Both productions were made using the outside broadcast techniques he had pioneered on Hamlet at Elsinore. Additional television directing credits include Gangsters (1975), Count Dracula (1977), Those Glory Glory Days (1983), Mandela (1987), First Born (1988), Fellow Traveller (1989), The Cloning of Joanna May (1991), Family Pictures (1993), The Buccaneers (1995), My Uncle Silas (2000), and Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale (2003). His 2009 documentary Pinter's Progress, made for Sundance international television channels and Sky Arts, drew on interviews with associates of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter.

For cinema, Saville directed The Fruit Machine (1988), released in the United States as Wonderland, Metroland (1997), and The Gospel of John (2003). He also directed a masterclass studio in London focused on dramatic improvisation.

In his personal life, Saville married actress, film, and theatre director Jane Arden in 1947. The couple had two sons and separated in the mid-1960s without divorcing. Arden died by suicide in 1982. Saville had a relationship with actress Pauline Boty, whom he met during her student years and with whom he had a daughter. He also had an eight-year relationship with actress Diana Rigg. From the 1960s, Saville lived in the former London home of the artist Augustus John in St John's Wood. In 1987 he married his second wife, Nina Francis, née Zuckerman, and the couple had a son together. In later life Saville gave his birth year as 1930, a date that appeared in all published obituaries following his death in December 2016.