Leslie Hardcastle
Head of the NFT and saviour of historic buildings in Soho
LESLIE HARDCASTLE, who has died aged 96, joked that he had spent much of his life “under Waterloo Bridge” – which was true as he was controller of the British Film Institute’s National Film Theatre complex (now BFI Southbank) below the southern end of the Bridge from its early beginnings until the 1990s, and devised the neighbouring Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI), which was opened in 1988 by the then Prince of Wales.
As a resident of Soho and president of the Soho Society, Hardcastle was also instrumental in saving many historic buildings from the wrecking ball. In 1974 he led a posse of Westminster councillors on a guided tour of “the other Soho”, housing craftsmen, specialised shopkeepers and residents, finishing with a dinner at his house in Great Pulteney Street, at which he told them: “Every one of the properties you visited tonight is scheduled for demolition.”
Four years later he was able to report that the atmosphere at City Hall had “changed beyond recognition”.
Jesse Leslie Hardcastle was born in Croydon on December 8 1926 to Francis Hardcastle and Dorothy, née Schofield. His parents were singers who performed on the variety stage and many members of his mother’s family were theatre folk.
He attended St Joseph’s College, Croydon, and during the war, joined St John Ambulance Brigade aged 16, working as a messenger. In 1943 an uncle, Johnnie Schofield, a well-known actor, got him a job with British Lion Films.
But Hardcastle originally wanted to be a doctor and towards the end of the war served as a nurse in the Navy in the Pacific theatre, including a stint on minesweepers off the coast of Australia, where his job was to “bandage everyone up” after mines were detonated.
After being demobbed in 1947, having given up ideas of a medical career, Hardcastle joined the BFI’S central booking agency and soon became involved in plans for a National Film Theatre (NFT) which initially opened in a temporary building (the Telecinema) at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Against expectations the Telecinema turned out to
be one of the most popular attractions of the festival. Renamed the National Film Theatre, it moved to its permanent home in 1957.
Hardcastle introduced the London Film Festival that year and served as its administrator until the early 1990s. As controller of the NFT from 1968 he oversaw the construction of NFT2, the BFI’S second screen, alongside a new restaurant.
Hardcastle’s original idea for the MOMI, which he developed in the 1980s with David Francis of the National Film Archive, was for a small museum about the art and history of cinema to put people in the mood for the daily film show at the NFT next door. But as The Daily Telegraph’s Alan Stanbrook observed, by the time it opened it had grown into “the epitome of everything that is fun and fancy free about the twin acts of film and television”.
In its first 20 weeks MOMI attracted more than 200,000 visitors, and after retiring as controller of the South Bank complex in 1991, Hardcastle was retained as curator to the museum until 1994, when his leaving present was a Judy Garland festival.
Sadly MOMI was shortlived. Closed in 1999 on a supposedly temporary basis pending relocation to the nearby Jubilee Gardens, its permanent closure was announced in 2002.
In retirement, Hardcastle became a consultant and eventually a governor of the BFI and remained involved in film-related projects. He was a founding member of the Soho Housing Association.
He was appointed OBE in 1974 and in 1989 received a lifetime achievement Bafta.
In 1968 he married Vivienne Richards, with whom he had two sons.