Hugh Whitemore
Award-winning writer who adapted Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time for television
HUGH WHITEMORE, the playwright, who has died aged 82, was one of the most prolific and distinguished writers for the small screen; he turned to the theatre with efficiency and seriousness of purpose in such West End successes as Pack of Lies (1983) and Breaking the Code (1986) and also wrote for cinema.
A conscientious and versatile craftsman, Whitemore wrote in the naturalistic vein, adapting both novels and stories from real life and adding his own shrewd sense of human, suburban or domestic detail to establish socially realistic atmosphere. He established himself in the 1960s and 1970s as a television playwright in such series as The Wednesday Play, Armchair Theatre, Elizabeth R and Play for Today.
Adaptations of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1971) and HE Bates’s Breeze Anstey (1972) won him Writers’ Guild awards, and he won Emmys in the US with his television series Concealed Enemies (1984), about the Alger Hiss case, and The Gathering Storm (2002), which concerned a difficult period in the marriage of Clementine and Winston Churchill just before the Second World War.
In the 1990s Whitemore won critical acclaim for his adaptation of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time into four films for Channel 4 (1997). He had come across Powell’s work in 1958, working in the piano department at Harrods. “I’d just failed to be an actor and I was trying to write. I was quite hard up,” he recalled in an interview. “And I bought At Lady Molly’s for half a crown or so. I read it, and thought it was wonderful.”
From then on it became Whitemore’s ambition to dramatise the books. “The sense of history informs everything I really enjoy doing,” he explained. “It has to do with making sense of the passage of time – a lifetime or an age or a century. Powell achieved something I always wanted to achieve. He’s linked emotion and experience in an historical context.”
The series, starring Simon Russell Beale in a multi-award winning performance as Kenneth Widmerpool, was full of pinpoint-accurate period detail and Whitemore felt that he owned the stories almost as much as the author himself. “Because it was a long, long job, in a weird, arrogant way I almost felt I’d written the books. I couldn’t disentangle the Powell from what was in my head. It’s almost as if the books were the idea for a film I was writing. And I was able to put some of my own feelings into it. The third film deals with the war. I was a child in the war and I remember seeing my father clambering into a crowded train, which is the image with which I start the film.”
Whitemore travelled to Somerset with a friend, the Canadian director, Alvin Rakoff, to talk to Powell about the adaptation. Powell’s wife, Lady Violet, told him that the fees would go towards a new roof for their house. As they took the train back to London – Whitemore hated driving – he remarked to Rakoff: “That’s what a writer’s life boils down to. Working for a new roof.”
If Whitemore’s stage plays sometimes suffered from the episodic approach he had adopted for television, they won critical respect for their attempt to deal thoughtfully with such difficult themes as literary angst, friendship and betrayal, homosexuality and espionage. While his characters were always firmly theatrical, his interest in human complexity and refusal to vulgarise attracted some of the country’s most intelligent leading actors.
In 1977 he created a vehicle for Glenda Jackson in the title role of
Stevie (Vaudeville), a persuasive and unsentimental portrait of the poet Stevie Smith based on her writings and on her life with her aunt in suburban north London. To the actress’s intellectual severity in the title role, Mona Washbourne provided a memorably warm and sunnily domestic contrast as her simple-hearted relative. Stevie was made into a 1980 film directed by Robert Enders.
Pack of Lies (Lyric, 1983), based on an earlier BBC Play For Today and on the real-life case of the Krogers – American spies for the Soviet Union arrested in London in 1961 – starred Judi Dench and her husband Michael Williams as a suburban couple who learn that the pleasant neighbours they have befriended in all innocence are not all they seem. The play was adapted for US television in 1986, with Ellen Burstyn and Alan Bates playing the British couple. Breaking the Code (Haymarket, 1986), gave Derek Jacobi one of his most moving roles as Alan Turing, the mathematician who played a key role in the allied victory in the Second World War by cracking the Enigma code, but whose resistance to the English code of “omerta” about homosexuality led to his being charged with gross indecency and hounded into suicide. Jacobi needed some persuading to take on the role.
“When Hugh sent me the play, I said, ‘All this mathematical theorem stuff. It’ll bore people rigid.’ And Hugh said, ‘No, think of the last role you did, Cyrano de Bergerac. Turing feels the same passion for maths as Cyrano did for Roxane.’ He was right.”
In The Best of Friends (Globe, 1988), Whitemore drew upon letters between Sir Sydney Cockerell, Keeper of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 1908 to 1937, George Bernard Shaw and Dame Laurentia Mclachlan, the Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire, to create a civilised conversation piece in which John Gielgud made a last and charmingly ruminative stage appearance as Cockerell.
Hugh John Whitemore was born at Tunbridge Wells, Kent on June 16 1936 and educated at The Judd School, Tonbridge, and King Edward VI School, Southampton. He spent only a year at Rada, where he was informed by one teacher that while he had the potential to make a great contribution to theatre, it would probably not be as an actor. So it proved.
His first television play, The Full
Chatter, was broadcast in 1963 and within two years he was producing five plays a year, a rate he more or less maintained until the 1980s. Notable early works for television included
Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat (1965), from a story by Roald Dahl, and an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1979).
He adapted Cervantes’s Adventures of Don Quixote (1973), Dickens’s David Copperfield (1974-75), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1975) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1976). He also collaborated with David Edgar and Robert Muller on Censors and with Brian Clark and director Clive Exton on The Eleventh Hour (both 1975).
For the latter, two writers, he and Clark, were teamed up on a Monday, with the fruits of their labour transmitted live on the Saturday. “We thought it was brilliant,” Whitemore recalled. “When we watched it, it was unspeakably bad.”
In 1989 he won an Emmy nomination for The Final Days, based on the Bob Woodward-carl Bernstein book about the downfall of President Nixon. His cinema screenplay credits include Man at the Top (1973), All Creatures Great and Small (1975), an adaptation of Helene Hanff ’s 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) which starred Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996), with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Later work for television included My House in Umbria (2003), an adaptation of William Trevor’s novella, starring Maggie Smith. His other works for the stage included It’s Ralph (Comedy, 1991), starring Timothy West as a self-satisfied television pundit visited by an unwelcome visitor from his past (Jack Shepherd), A Letter of Resignation (Comedy, 1997), with Edward Fox as Harold Macmillan struggling to come to terms with his wife Dorothy’s (Clare Higgins) affair with his colleague Lord Boothby, and an adaptation of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me (Playhouse Theatre, 2005), starring Kristin Scott Thomas.
His last play, Sand in the Sandwiches (Minerva Theatre, Chichester and Theatre Royal Haymarket, 2016), a solo show for Edward Fox as John Betjeman, earned unenthusiastic reviews.
Whitemore’s first two marriages, to Jill Brooke and Sheila Lemon, were dissolved. He is survived by his third wife, the actress Rohan Mccullough, and by a son from his marriage to Sheila Lemon.
Hugh Whitemore, born June 16 1936, died July 17 2018