Wry, baggy-eyed critic who presented Film ’72 to ’98
Affable, wry and laconic, Barry
Norman, who has died aged 83,
was one of Britain’s best loved, and most influential, film critics. As the presenter of the weekly review show Film ’72, right through to Film ’98, he “perfected a flair for talking beguilingly about cinema to a mass television audience” in a way that did not make cinephiles “wince”, said The Guardian. Unfailingly honest in his appraisals, Norman tried to be fair about the films, and polite to the stars he interviewed – but he was no lickspittle. He nearly came to blows with John Wayne over the war in Vietnam (Wayne called him a “liberal pinko faggot”); he described Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “humourless, selfsatisfied clod”; and he walked out of a scheduled meeting with Madonna in Paris, when she was an hour and 40 minutes late.
Barry Norman was born into a film family in 1933: his father, Leslie, worked his way up at Ealing Studios, and produced The Cruel Sea. He hoped to go into the business himself, but by the time he left Highgate School, the British film industry was in decline, and he went into journalism instead, working for the Daily Sketch and the Daily Mail, as a showbiz editor and critic, before going freelance. He was originally taken on for three episodes of Film ’72, but viewers warmed to his laid-back, baggy-eyed charms, and he remained for 26 years, becoming so famous that he had his own Spitting Image puppet. (He credited Rory Bremner with popularising his supposed catchphrase – “And why not?” – but he still used it as the title of his memoir.)
Having been lured over to Sky in 1998, he gave up that show in 2001, complaining that Hollywood was only interested in making films based on comic books. A Radio 4 stalwart, he presented the Today programme in the 1970s, and the travel show Going Places, and was chairman of The News Quiz. He made several documentaries about cinema, and wrote ten novels. In 2007, he diversified, rather unexpectedly, into food, lending his name to a range of pickled onions that was sold in supermarkets.
Norman was often described as the thinking woman’s crumpet, and Michelle Pfeiffer was famously flirtatious with him in an interview in 1992. But he only had eyes for his wife, Diana, who died in 2011. He is survived by their two daughters.