San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Director was only single-season double Tony winner
Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed stage director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died Sunday. He was 95.
His death was announced by his agents Tuesday. It did not say where he died.
Blakemore was nominated seven times for Tonys, notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’ “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off ” in 1983.
But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a troupe of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later Frayn play, “Copenhagen,” that won him the unique double of best direction of a musical and best direction of a play in 2000. (“Kiss Me, Kate” garnered five Tonys altogether, including for best revival of a musical and for best actor in a musical, given to Brian Stokes Mitchell.)
Blakemore was born in Sydney but built his career in Britain, first as an actor and later as one of Laurence Olivier’s associate directors at the National Theater in London.
There, he staged some highly successful productions: “The National Health,” Nichols’ sardonic portrayal of British hospitals, and revivals of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s satire of newspaper journalism, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he directed Olivier.
It had been widely thought that Blakemore would succeed Olivier, who stepped down as the National’s artistic director in 1973. Instead, the theater appointed Peter Hall, who had directed Blakemore in Stratford-upon-Avon during his acting years and with whom he had an intense rivalry. Their relationship soured, and Blakemore resigned in 1976.
But he went on to prosper as a freelance director. He staged Nichols’ “Privates on Parade,” a burlesque musical comedy set in post-World War II Malaysia, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he began a long association with Frayn in 1980 when he directed his drama “Make and Break,” about a businessman who loses his soul.
Then came Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an inventive farce about second-rate provincial stage actors performing a slapstick sex farce of their own. It transferred from London to Broadway in 1983 and ran for 553 performances there.
“‘Noises Off’ couldn’t have arrived in New York a moment too soon,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times. The show, he said, was “as cleverly conceived and adroitly performed a farce as Broadway has seen in an age.”
It was a triumph that, Blakemore later said, left him feeling that he had at long last ended “the bad dream the National had become.”
Michael Howell Blakemore was born June 18, 1928, in Sydney to Conrad Howell Blakemore, an eminent eye surgeon, and Una Mary (Litchfield) Blakemore. He said he was a descendant of John Quincy Adams through his American grandmother, who supported Michael’s artistic leanings while his father discouraged them. In the first of two memoirs, “Arguments With England” (2004), Blakemore described his father as an “unpredictable adversary” who
disliked “scruffy bohemians and longhaired intellectuals.”
Blakemore survived what he remembered as the “martinet discipline” of a boarding school, but not a course of study in medicine that his father had persuaded him to take at the University of Sydney. “I solved the problem of how not to be a doctor by failing
all my third-year examinations,” he said.
He was more fascinated with theater and film, especially American movies of the 1930s and ’40s, but it was seeing Olivier as Richard III in Sydney that inspired him to go to London to become an actor. He achieved that ambition thanks to another touring
British actor, Robert Morley, who befriended the stagestruck Blakemore, employed him as his publicist and arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950.
After graduating in 1952, Blakemore was cast in a series of regional repertory productions. Before long he was touring Europe as a Roman captain in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a revival starring Oliver and staged by British director Peter Brook, who became an inspiration to Blakemore. Brook, he wrote, “had that concentration, in which empathy and detachment are somehow combined, that I was beginning to recognize as the mark of the good director.”
Known for his calmness in the rehearsal room and, in his words, for “getting my way without anyone particularly noticing,” Blakemore defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”
It was an ideal he strove to attain, usually successfully, in other Broadway productions, including the Coleman musical “The Life” in 1997, a belated world premiere for Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” in 2007 and, in 2009, a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” with Angela Lansbury at her funniest as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.
Blakemore was married twice: in 1960 to Shirley Bush, with whom he had a son, and, after their divorce in 1986, to Tanya McCallin, with whom he had two daughters. He and McCallin later separated, according to the news release that announced Blakemore’s death.
He is survived by McCallin; his children, Conrad, Beatrice and Clemmie; and three grandchildren.