James Cellan Jones
Director
JAMES CELLAN Jones, who has died at 88, was a producer and director of television drama whose output from the 1960s onwards helped to set the standard for the colour era.
His credits include the original production of The Forsyte Saga
– ironically the last major series to be shot in black-and-white – and the BBC’s 1987 BBC television adaptation of Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, which made stars of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. As the corporation’s head of plays in the late 1970s, he commissioned Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven.
The Forsyte Saga, in particular, was a phenomenon of its time. Eric Porter was the cruel Soames Forsyte, whose tempestuous relationship with his wife, Irene (Nyree Dawn Porter) captivated the nation to such an extent that 18m people tuned in to watch the last of the 26 episodes, on their repeat run on BBC1. The series was also a success in America, and was the first BBC production to be sold to the Soviet Union.
Although a period piece, based on John Galsworthy’s novels, it foreshadowed the sexuallycharged plots of the prime-time soaps of a decade later, and whetted the public appetite for costume drama for years to come.
The seven episodes directed by Cellan Jones represented his first major assignment, having cut his teeth on episodes of Z Cars and a 1966, seven-part adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
He had joined the BBC in 1955 as a call boy, and rose through the ranks of production management before being handed his own slate. But he was by no means wedded to the corporation, and his work elsewhere included Thames TV’s Emmy-nominated Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill in 1974, in which Lee Remick played the American socialite who was the mother of the future Prime Minister.
He also directed Judi Dench and her husband, the late Michael Williams, in LWT’s sensitive sitcom, A Fine Romance.
Alan James Gwynne Cellan Jones was born in Swansea, into a family of physicians. His father, Cecil Cellan Jones, was an eminent surgeon. James attended the Dragon School in Oxford, and Charterhouse in Surrey, and went on to study natural sciences at St John’s, Cambridge. But an encounter with the Cambridge Footlights society convinced him that his future lay in the theatre, rather than the family business.
National service in Korea with the Royal Engineers interrupted his training at the BBC, but he was soon back in the thick of it. It was the era of live drama, and the discipline of running the studio floor was invaluable. Eventually, he was given his first big break, helping to direct a serialisation of RD Blackmore’s West Country romance, Lorna Doone, for BBC Bristol. It was the to be first in a list of more than 60 major credits.
In later life, he was elected chairman of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and was honorary president of the Directors’ Guild of Great Britain. In 2010, the British Film Institute staged a two-week celebration of his work on the South Bank.
His 2006 autobiography was called Forsyte and Hindsight.
He married Margot Eavis in 1959, and they had a daughter and two sons, including the TV director Simon Cellan Jones. The BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones is his son from a previous relationship. Margot died in 2016 and his son Deiniol in 2013. He is survived by his other children and by nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.