The Yorkshire chemist's son who took kitchen sink realism to the Oscars
Tony Richardson, born in Shipley in 1928, helped launch Britain's angry young men on stage, then filmed their working-class stories in grainy realism. In 1964 his romp Tom Jones won him Oscars for both Best Director and Best Picture, and his career kept swerving between genres for decades afterwards.
Richardson grew up the son of a chemist, Clarence Albert Richardson, near Saltaire, where he kept grass snakes as a boy. At Wadham College, Oxford, he became president of the Experimental Theatre Club and also of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, a double nobody had managed before, while reviewing plays for the student magazine Isis. Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch were Oxford contemporaries.
His professional start came in 1955 with a television version of Giraudoux's The Apollo of Bellac, and that same year he co-directed the short Momma Don't Allow with Karel Reisz as part of the Free Cinema movement. He helped form the English Stage Company with George Devine and George Goetschius, staged John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, and in 1957 directed Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in The Entertainer.
In 1959 he set up Woodfall Film Productions with Osborne and producer Harry Saltzman. Woodfall's first release was his screen Look Back in Anger, and the company went on to back A Taste of Honey and an Alan Sillitoe adaptation about a teenage runner, films still counted among the pillars of kitchen sink realism. Then came Tom Jones, drawn from Henry Fielding, and the double Academy Award win. The partnership with Osborne soured during The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968, and the playwright later lampooned him as a tyrant in The Hotel in Amsterdam.
Later work ranged widely: Mademoiselle, shot in rural France in monochrome with no score; Ned Kelly, an Australian western; and The Hotel New Hampshire, a flop at the box office that critics liked. Berry Gordy fired him early in the making of Mahogany. Married to Vanessa Redgrave from 1962 to 1967, he fathered actresses Natasha and Joely Richardson. He died of AIDS complications in November 1991, aged 63; his final film, Blue Sky, reached cinemas nearly three years later and earned Jessica Lange a Best Actress Oscar.
Source: Tony Richardson
