Director nominated for an Oscar for The Lion in Winter
ANTHONY HARVEY, who has died aged 87, was a British-born film editor turned director who won a Directors Guild of America award and was nominated for a best director Oscar for The Lion in Winter (1968), the historical drama which starred Peter O’toole as King Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.
It was O’toole, who had been impressed by Harvey’s directorial debut, a lowbudget screen adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (1966), starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr, who pressed for Harvey to direct The Lion
in Winter. A rapport soon developed between Harvey and Katharine Hepburn, who once joked that they got on so well because “we both behave extremely badly to get what we want”.
The film earned a total of seven Academy Award nominations, with Katharine Hepburn winning the third of her four Oscars for her wonderfully prickly performance as Eleanor, and remains a perennial favourite among film fans.
Harvey would go on to direct the star in a 1973 television version of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and, less successfully, in the 1984 film Grace Quigley, in which she starred as an lonely widow in New York who, after twice trying to kill herself, blackmails a hitman (Nick Nolte) to do the job. As Harvey recalled, “I once said to Hepburn, ‘God, I’d like to get my name off this,’ and she said, ‘What about mine?’… I shut up after that.”
The actress became famous for never turning up in person to collect her awards. Harvey recalled stumbling across her Oscar for The Lion in Winter in a dusty cupboard in her house, still sealed in its original wrapping. He had collected the award (which she shared with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl) on her behalf, recalling that, following Barbra Streisand on to the stage, he had stood on her gown by mistake and ripped it. “By the time we got to our places, I’m standing next to [the presenter] Ingrid Bergman and all we could see was the back and her behind.”
Anthony Harvey was born on June 3 1930 in London. His father died when he was very young and he took his name from his stepfather, Morris Harvey, an actor and writer. When he was 14 he played Ptolemy, Vivien Leigh’s brother, in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). He won a scholarship to Rada, but soon realised that he was not cut out to be an actor and decided to move into film making.
He began his editing career at Denham Studios and Ealing Studios as a protégé of the Boulting Brothers, working on such well-known films as the war comedy Private’s Progress (1956), starring Richard Attenborough and Terrythomas, On Such A Night (1958), the 1959 comedy
I’m All Right Jack, and the Anthony Asquith comedy The Millionairess, starring Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren.
In 1962 Harvey worked with Bryan Forbes on The L-shaped Room and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita. This led to further work with Kubrick, including editing Dr Strangelove (1964). In 1965 he edited the Cold War classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by Martin Ritt.
His other directing credits included They Might Be Giants (1971), starring George C Scott as a psychiatric patient who is convinced he is Sherlock Holmes; Players (1979), a romantic drama set in the tennis world starring Ali Macgraw; and The Abdication (1974) and Richard’s Things (1980), both starring Liv Ullmann.
Another project, A Glimpse of Tiger (1970), was abandoned after four days amid rumours that its star, Elliott Gould, had come to blows with Harvey, lashed out at his co-star Kim Darby and was high on drugs.
Harvey was unmarried.
Anthony Harvey, born June 3 1930, died November 23 2017