Co-founded Virgin, Palace Pictures
NIK POWELL 1950-2019 Helped produce Crying Game, Last Orders
Nik Powell, who has died of cancer aged 69, began his career looking after the accounts of his childhood friend, Richard Branson, with whom he founded Virgin Records. Later, he formed the British film industry’s most colourful double act with Stephen Woolley, their Palace Pictures producing some of the best-known British films, including Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Last Orders (2001), and Ladies in Lavender (2004).
From 2003 to 2017 Powell was director of U.K.’S cashstrapped National Film and Television School, which he turned around.
His students won four Oscar nominations, seven Bafta awards and 10 Cilect Global Student Film awards. He was also chair of Bafta’s film committee from 2010 to 2016.
An erudite, impassioned man who wore pinstripe jackets over scruffy slacks and scuffed shoes, Powell was described as a “disarming cross between a tycoon and a superannuated hippie.”
He was born Nov. 4, 1950. At age eight, he crashed a moped into a garden wall, injuring his head. Fits began, requiring the use of barbiturates; they continued for 40 years.
Powell told dramatic stories of his affliction — of falling through plate glass at the Virgin offices, of collapsing and cracking his head at a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, of being scraped off the sidewalk in New York by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders.
Powell met Branson at junior school in the 1950s, and created Branson’s first enterprise, the magazine Student. Next, Powell helped establish Virgin Records. Branson offered him 40 per cent of the company.
The relationship lasted 13 years, during which time profits rose to £60 million. Powell received £1 million and a few assets for his 40 per cent.
In 1983 he and Woolley founded Palace Pictures. Its first film was Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), a critical success, with other hits leading up to the Oscar-winning The Crying Game.
But by then, debts had grown, and in 1993, the company collapsed.
Nonetheless, a few months later the pair founded Scala, which in three years became Britain’s busiest independent production company.