Peter Duffell
Veteran British director whose films included England Made Me and The House That Dripped Blood
PETER DUFFELL, who has died aged 95, was a Bafta-winning film and television director, whose work across five decades included the hugely popular Indian Raj miniseries The Far Pavilions and a cult horror film, The House That Dripped Blood.
He also achieved the distinction of winning the approval of the writer Graham Greene, who was notoriously dismissive of most films of his work that he had not adapted for the cinema himself.
Greene had expressed himself as “pleased enough” after watching a preview of Duffell’s excellent 1973 version of England Made Me, starring Peter Finch, Michael York and Hildegard Neil, and would later write to the director describing the film as “excellent”.
Duffell had co-written the screenplay with an old friend, Desmond Cory, who suggested changing the focus of Greene’s 1935 novel – loosely set in Sweden – to Germany during the rise of Nazism while also retaining, in Greene’s own words, the original theme of “a brother and sister in the confusion of incestuous love”.
“We were in the position of having to write a lot of dialogue that wasn’t in the book simply because of the change of scene and having to alter the structure to suit the medium,” Duffell recalled. “And we slaved mightily to try and write Graham Greene-style dialogue.”
As a result of England Made Me, Duffell and Greene became firm friends and then unofficial collaborators when the director decided to take a crack at adapting Greene’s 1973 novel, The Honorary Consul, set in Argentina. With regularly helpful notes from Greene, Duffell produced at least three draft screenplays over the five years after the book’s publication before finally bowing out of the project when neither money nor bankable stars seemed forthcoming.
The film, co-starring Richard Gere and Michael Caine and directed by John Mackenzie, was eventually shot in 1983, with a Christopher Hampton script, 10 years after Duffell had initiated his own tilt at the source material.
By this time, Duffell had also established himself as a successful television director, having begun in the 1960s on series such as The Avengers and Man in A Suitcase. He would direct a seminal episode of ITV’S Inspector Morse series (“Last Bus to Woodstock”) as well as the five-hour
Channel Four adaptation of MM Kaye’s The Far Pavilions.
In 1980 he won a Bafta award for his direction of Best Single Play for the BBC’S Caught on a Train, written by Stephen Poliakoff. Clearly influenced by Hitchcock and claustrophobic classics such as The Lady Vanishes
(though Poliakoff would always deny it), the story centres on a suspenseful battle of wills between a young British publisher (played by Michael Kitchen) and an elderly, haughty Viennese woman (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) aboard a train hurtling across Europe (actually the Nene Valley near Peterborough).
The child of a broken marriage, Peter Duffell was born on July 10 1922 at the Sun Hotel, Canterbury, the so-called “Dickens Inn”, which his grandparents owned, in a room where, legend had it,
David Copperfield’s Mr Micawber was said to have peered from a window waiting for “something to turn up”.
Peter was educated at South West London College and Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, before winning a place to read English Literature, at Keble College, Oxford, where he was a near contemporary of other aspiring filmmakers such as John Schlesinger and Tony Richardson.
After trying but failing to get into the BBC, Duffell successfully applied for a job at the London Press Exchange, an old established advertising agency, soon working in its screen and radio department making cinema advertisements and radio programmes which, he would later reveal in a gossipy 2011 memoir, Playing Piano in a Brothel, was where his journey to becoming a film director properly began.
After directing television commercials for, among other products, eggs, white chocolate bars and washing powder, as well as sponsored documentaries, Duffell finally got his drama “break” at Merton Park Studios working on a popular, micro-budgeted, series called Scotland Yard Mysteries, short films originally made to support the main feature in a cinema double-bill, introduced in famously sepulchral tones by the criminologist Edgar Lustgarten.
This led to his first feature, which he was required to film in double quick time, the same studio’s Partners in Crime (1961). It would be another 10 years before Duffell got a chance to direct his second feature, the wellreviewed portmanteau horror film, The House That Dripped Blood, written by the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, in which Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliott and Jon Pertwee co-star in four interconnected segments of well-executed chills.
Apart from England Made Me, Duffell would only direct three more films for cinema – Inside Out (1975), a heist caper about a search for Nazi gold, with Telly Savalas, Experience Preferred, But Not Essential (1982), a comedy, and King of the Wind (1990), an adventure story about a legendary Arabian horse. He also put in an uncredited stint as a second unit director supervising the flying sequences on Superman (1978) – and there was an aborted biopic of Genghis Khan.
Mainly he devoted himself to television, notably with a superb adaptation of Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall (1980) and several episodes of the colourful sci-fi series Space Precinct (1995), devised by Gerry Anderson.
The Far Pavilions (1984), a five-hour three-part television miniseries starring Ben Cross, Amy Irving, Omar Sharif and Christopher Lee, was by far his most ambitious project. An adaptation by Julian Bond of MM Kaye’s bestselling 900-page “forbidden romance” saga, set during the 19th century British Raj, was screened by the new television network, Channel Four, in its early days, hot on the heels of ITV’S awardwinning series The Jewel in the Crown (which Duffell claimed to have turned down as co-director), and the bigscreen blockbuster, Gandhi, both set in the subcontinent. Shot on location with a budget of £9m, the series proved that Duffell could handle big projects with flair and confidence. It achieved the highest viewer ratings of any programme presented during the channel’s first year.
A lifelong jazz and cricket fan and a proficient flamenco guitarist, Duffell was once described by Sir Christopher Lee as “the most underrated director we have had in Britain for a very long time”.
Duffell’s first two marriages were dissolved. In 1991 he married, thirdly, Rosslyn Cliffe, a former publicist, who survives him along with a son from his second marriage to the actress Patricia Mccarron.
Peter Duffell, born July 10 1922, died December 12 2017