Alvin Rakoff obituary: veteran director of British film and TV

It’s a shame that Alvin Rakoff, the Canadian director who has died at the age of 97, should have waited until his 10th decade to write his memoirs. I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action (2021) and I Need Another Take, Darling (2022) are stuffed with choice anecdotes about working in live television and dealing with the egos of some of cinema’s biggest names. But they only cover the first part of a 70-year career that was largely spent in Britain.

Rakoff recalled his Depression-era childhood in a Toronto dry goods store in his 2007 novel Baldwin Street. But it was a trip to New York that changed the young journalist’s life, as he saw Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a writer. A secondment to the BBC in 1952 resulted in the 26-year-old selling a script and becoming the youngest director in the drama department, where he adapted the techniques acquired covering sporting events and variety shows.

Having won a National Television Award for Waiting for Gillian (1954), Rakoff was entrusted with The Hole in the Wall, which was the BBC’s offering on the night ITV went live on 22 September 1955. As American programmes were not imported at this time, the BBC chose Rakoff for its 1957 version of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, which had won a Peabody Award. When Jack Palance decided at the 11th hour not to reprise the role of washed-up boxer Harlan ‘Mountain’ McClintock, Rakoff took the advice of actor fiancée Jacqueline Hill in casting Scottish bit player Sean Connery as her co-star.

A young Michael Caine also had a walk-on in this sadly wiped production, which seemingly typified Rakoff’s ability to choreograph four cameras in tight spaces without distracting from the intimacy of the performance. Such was his standing at the BBC that, in 1962, he directed Terence Rattigan’s Heart to Heart for The Largest Theatre in the World series that attracted 80 million viewers across Europe. Similarly, he handled the first dramas shown on BBC2 when it launched in 1964, with Ken Taylor’s The Seekers trilogy going out on successive Sundays.

Although television directors were reinvigorating Hollywood, British studio executives were suspicious of small-screen interlopers, and Rakoff had to cut his teeth on the Eddie Constantine vehicles Passport to Shame (1958) and The Treasure of San Teresa (1959). Nevertheless, Cubby Broccoli consulted him when it came to casting James Bond, and he faced down a fulminating Rod Steiger when telling him to tone down the Method mugging in On Friday at Eleven (1961). A showdown with Bette Davis went less well, however, as she had Rakoff fired off The Anniversary (1968).

He was feted for The Comedy Man (1964), a gritty insider exposé of showbiz that brought the best out of Kenneth More, and gave Peter Sellers the chance to play a rare dramatic role in Hoffman (1970), a remake of his own 1967 Armchair Theatre production ‘Call Me Daddy’, which had starred Donald Pleasence and earned Rakoff an Emmy.

Although he scored a cult horror hit with Death Ship (1980), the remainder of Rakoff’s features were rather prosaic. Yet he regularly brought cinematic scope to his TV work, filming The Adventures of Don Quixote (1973) in the locations specified by Cervantes and creating such exquisite visuals for the 1978 BBC Television Shakespeare version of Romeo and Juliet (which launched Alan Rickman) that the Los Angeles Times reckoned they could hang in a gallery.

Although he also directed for the stage and made numerous one-shot TV episodes, Rakoff latterly came to specialise in mini-series after winning a second Emmy for John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father (1982). He reunited with Mortimer on Paradise Postponed (1986) before closing his screen career with the Anthony Powell adaptation A Dance to the Music of Time (1997).

• Alvin Rakoff, 18 February 1927 to 12 October 2024