The Stage

Ronald Neame

Published Tuesday 29 June 2010 at 13:34 by Richard Anthony Baker

For more than 50 years, Ronald Neame enjoyed a distinguished career in the British film industry. In 1968, he directed Maggie Smith in her Oscar-winning role as the eccentric Scottish schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Four years later, he went to Hollywood to oversee the first of the seventies disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure, which by 1974 had taken its place among the six most successful films in cinema history.

As Neame said himself, he was virtually born in a film studio. His father was a society photographer who occasionally directed films and his mother was a former beauty queen who became a star of silent movies. It was she who got him a job as a tea boy at Elstree. He quickly worked his way up to become assistant cameraman on the first British talkie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail [1929]. He then moved to Ealing, where he photographed six comedies starring George Formby, with the whole crew being forced to contend with Formby’s shrewish wife, Beryl, who insisted on always being on the set.

Neame got his first break in 1942, when he was asked to photograph Noel Coward’s tribute to the Royal Navy, In Which We Serve. The co-director was David Lean and, with the producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, they formed Cineguild, an all but autonomous production company within the Rank Organisation. During the forties, Cineguild produced some of Britain’s finest pictures, Coward’s This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter and adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Neame’s first success as a director came with three Alec Guinness films, The Card [1952], The Horse’s Mouth [1958] and Tunes of Glory [1960], Neame’s favourite film.

Two years later, he directed Judy Garland’s last cinema role in I Could Go On Singing. By then, Garland was a fragile figure. Neame had to explain to his wife why he had to sit up with her in her dressing room in the early hours of the morning, listening to her life story. Neame believed in nurturing and promoting his actors. He once said: “You gave actors everything you could to let them develop their characters. Now, directors draw attention to themselves, which I find reprehensible.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie came in 1968. Vanessa Redgrave had taken the title role on stage, but refused to play “that proto-Fascist” on film. Twentieth Century Fox asked Neame to save The Poseidon Adventure [1972] after the original director walked out. A star-studded cast played passengers trying to escape from an ocean liner that had been overturned by a freak wave. Neame was canny enough to demand 5% of the box office takings, making him a very rich man indeed.

Four years ago, he recalled doctors advising him to cut down on the two large vodkas he enjoyed at lunchtime and the three large whiskies he supped in the evening. He outlived them all.

Ronald Neame, who was born on April 23, 1911, died on June 16, aged 99.