When the fortunes of Hammer Films were somewhat shaky in the early 1960s, many people found it odd that they should recruit the director Don Sharp. Until then, he had made films only for children’s Saturday morning cinema shows. In fact, he had not even seen a horror movie. But he had a reputation for working quickly and inexpensively and his first Hammer film, The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), at the start of which a stake is shown being driven through a coffin, followed by a long, awful scream, marked the start of the studio’s revival.
Sharp started out as a child actor in Australia and came to England in 1949 to pursue his career. He appeared in three films, before directing two pictures for the Children’s Film Foundation. He then directed two pop music movies, The Golden Disc (1958), in which the once popular Terry Dene, sometimes known as Britain’s Elvis, appeared, and It’s All Happening (1963), which featured Tommy Steele staging a show to save the orphanage where he was brought up.
From then on, however, he was mostly associated with horror films. In The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), he worked with one of Hammer’s biggest stars, Christopher Lee. Over the next 15 years, they made six films together, including two in which Lee played the Oriental villain, Fu Manchu. A few of his movies achieved cult status, one of them being Psychomania (1972), in which a gang of bikers makes a pact with the Devil. It was the last film made by George Sanders, who committed suicide shortly afterwards.
Away from the blood and gore, Sharp took charge of a television version of The Four Feathers (1978), with Robert Powell and Simon Ward, and an adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s historical romance A Woman of Substance (1984), starring Jenny Seagrove.
Don Sharp, who was born on April 19, 1911, died on December 18, 2011, aged 90.
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