Clive Donner, film director

Clive Donner was born in the Priory Nursing Home at 43 Priory Road West Hampstead, in January 1926. He grew up in 31 Peter Avenue, Willesden Green, where his parents Alex and Deborah Donner, lived for most of their lives. Alex was a concert violinist and Deborah ran a dress shop. Clive attended Gladstone Park junior school and Kilburn Grammar school. He became interested in film when he accompanied his father to a studio recording session. While at Kilburn Polytechnic he made an 8mm film about a boys’ sports club. In 1942 he was working as a shipping clerk when his father who was recording the music for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), asked Michael Powell the director, if he could find a job for Clive at Denham Studios. After several rejections he got a job as a junior assistant editor for the Sydney Box film On Approval (1944). He gained experience and formed a close friendship with Fergus McDonell, who later edited several of Donner’s films.

Clive was called up in 1944 and served three years in the Army ending as a sergeant in the education corps. After he was demobilised, he got a job assembling the daily rushes at Pinewood Studios. Then he worked as first assistant editor on two of David Lean’s films, Passionate Friends (1949) and Madeline (1950). Donner greatly admired Lean for his instance on the highest standards of film making. By 1951 Donner had become an editor on films such as Scrooge (1951), Genevieve (1953) and I Am a Camera (1955).

The Secret Place, Belinda Lee and a young David McCallum (1957)

He made his debut as a director on The Secret Place (1957), a realistic film about a policeman’s son whose infatuation with a young girlfriend of a crook, leads to his inadvertent involvement in a jewel robbery. Donner used location shooting, much of it filmed at night, which prefigured the British new wave films that emerged in the next few years. Because he was offered few exciting films, he was glad to be released from his contract with Rank to work in the new field of television advertising. He also directed episodes of Danger Man (1961) starring Patrick McGoohan. His first popular film was Some People (1962) about working-class teenagers who formed a rock band in Bristol.

Poster for The Caretaker

In 1963 he used a small budget from a consortium including; Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, Peter Hall and Peter Sellers, and others who each put up £1,000, to make an film adaptation of his friend Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker (1963). This was shot in black and white in an empty house in Hackney by the stylish cinematographer Nicolas Roeg. With excellent performances from Donald Pleasance, Alan Bates and Robert Shaw, it won an award at the Berlin Film Festival and established Donner’s reputation as a director. During the 1960s he lived in a flat at Weymouth Street, Marylebone.

Clive Donner with the cast of What's New Pussycat (Getty Images, 1965)

Donner’s biggest box office hit was What’s New Pussycat (1965), one of the first ‘Swinging London’ films which was actually filmed in Paris. It was a farce starring Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentice and Ursula Andress. The title comes from Warren Beatty’s phone call salutation to his female friends, and it featured the hit song by Tom Jones, which was written by Bert Bacharach and Hal David. Beatty was going to play the notorious womaniser, but dropped out and the part was offered to Peter O’Toole. The role of crazy psychiatrist Dr Fassbender was planned for Groucho Marx, but O’Toole wanted Peter Sellers who had recently achieved success as Inspector Clouseau.

Bewigged Peter Sellers and Clive Donner in Paris (1965)

Clive Donner was given a budget of over £6M by an American producer to make Alfred the Great (1969), with David Hemmings in the lead role. Three years later Clive married Australian-born Jocelyn Richards who had worked as costume designer on the film. They bought a country cottage at Speen in Buckinghamshire, and a house at 6 Melina Place, off Grove End Road in St John’s Wood.

Jocelyn Rickards photographed by Alec Murray

Jocelyn designed the costumes for films which defined the 60s, including Look Back in Anger (1959), From Russia with Love (1963), The Knack (1965), and Blow Up (1966). She had studied art in Sydney and travelled to England in a converted troop ship with ‘rats in the wardrobe and crabs in the pool’. She arrived in London in 1949 and continued her relationship with Australian fashion photographer Alec Murray. 

During the 50s she had affairs with the philosopher AJ ‘Freddie’ Ayer, and the writers Graham Greene and John Osborne who described her as a woman of ‘passionate intelligence and emotional candor’. She was called ‘one of the most exciting women in London’ by Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry. She met Clive Donner while they were making Alfred the Great and they remained together for the rest of their lives.

Veruschka in a Jocelyn Rickards dress for Blow Up (1966)

With the downturn in film attendances, Clive Donner turned to the theatre, directing Shakespeare, and revivals of two of Pinter’s plays. He returned to film, making several spoofs including Vampira (1975) and Charlie Chan and the Dragon Queen (1982).

Donner was better employed by BBC TV where he made an excellent adaptation of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1976) starring Peter O’Toole. This was Donner’s favourite film. In the 80s he continued to work in television both in England and America but these programmes did not match the quality of his earlier work.

Rogue Male, on the cover of the Radio Times (1976)

By 2000 Donner had sold his cottage and the St John’s Wood house and moved to a flat in Rainville Road Hammersmith. When their health deteriorated, they moved to the Sunrise Assisted Living home in Virginia Water, where Jocelyn died of pneumonia in July 2005, and Clive died from Alzheimer’s on 6 September 2010.