The Stage

Lord Brabourne

Published Wednesday 19 October 2005 at 16:15

John Brabourne, producer of such films as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Passage to India, died on September 22, aged 80. A director of Thames Television, Euston Films and Thorn EMI, his entrepreneurial skills were crucial to creating some major successes in the British cinema.

In the sixties he produced two celebrated Shakespeare adaptations, the 1965 film of Othello starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet. He also produced a film version of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1968), starring Olivier.

John Ulick Knatchbull, the seventh Baron Brabourne, was born on November 9, 1924 and educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford. He succeeded to his title when his brother, Norton, was killed in action in 1943. During the war John Brabourne served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards in France. He married Patricia Mountbatten, daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten, in 1946.

Brabourne began his film career as a production manager on such movies as The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and he later co-produced, with Richard Goodwin, the 1959 wartime drama Sink the Bismarck!.

Three years later he and Goodwin set up a consortium to introduce Pay-TV, a cable service whose subscribers would buy films, opera and the arts on meter. The scheme eventually failed and Brabourne and his partners decided to wind up the operation with £1 million losses. “We were years ahead of our time,” he said.

Brabourne went on to produce a series of box office hits including Up the Junction (1968), The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) starring Albert Finney, Death on the Nile (1978), with Peter Ustinov, The Mirror Crack’d (1980) with Elizabeth Taylor, Evil Under the Sun (1982) again with Ustinov, and Little Dorrit (1988) starring Alec Guinness.

He always described himself as a “creative producer”. “I’ve always been very involved with the directors,” he said. “I set out to become a director myself but changed my mind. The things that interested me were the story, which is number one for me, the script, which is certainly number two, and the third really important factor is the editing. I found that, although I like to work with actors, I don’t really have a feeling for directing.”

He was also a governor of the British Film Institute and was appointed a CBE in 1983 for his services to the film industry.

Brabourne was among the seven-strong boat party which was blown up by the IRA at County Sligo, Ireland in 1979. His 14-year-old son Nicholas and his mother, the dowager Lady Brabourne, were killed in the blast as well as his father-in-law Lord Mountbatten. Lord Brabourne, his wife and Nicholas’ twin brother Timothy survived the explosion after being thrown clear but had serious injuries.

Lord Brabourne died at his home in Kent with his wife Countess Mountbatten of Burma and their six children at his side. His eldest son, Norton, Lord Romsey, succeeds him.

Patrick Newley