HORACE OVÉ
(3 December 1936 - 16 September 2023)
Sir Horace Shango Ové CBE was a Trinidadian-born British filmmaker and photographer who made an extraordinary contribution to UK black independent cinema. He was the first black British director to make a full-length feature film, Pressure, in 1976, which the British Film Institute are now re-releasing. Having suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for many years, Ové has died, aged 86. During his life he provided a perspective on the black experience after World War II and, although at times a controversial figure, he covered racism, the Windrush generation, the Black Power movement, as well as black literature, music and art.
Horace Ové was born in Belmont, Port of Spain, in Trinidad, to Lorna and Lawrence Ové who were shopkeepers and café owners for the local population. In 1960 he moved to the UK to study painting, photography and design and he lived too in Rome, working as a painter and also as an extra on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, his first taste of the film industry. Back home he married an Irish immigrant, Mary Irvine, and joined the London School of Film Technique.
His first film was a short, The Art of the Needle (1966), for the Acupuncture Association. He then documented the African-American writer James Baldwin and the civil rights activist Dick Gregory in Baldwin’s Nigger. For the BBC he made Reggae (1970), filmed at a concert in Wembley Arena. Pressure (1976) was a feature about the life of a teenager who joins the Black Power movement. Because it contained scenes of police brutality, its backers, the British Film Institute, banned it for two years. Ové worked on more films for the BBC including A Hole in Babylon, covering the Spaghetti House siege in 1975, the Empire Road series, The Black Safari, King Carnival and Skateboard Kings. For ITV he did The Latchkey Children and an episode of The Professionals. For Channel 4 he did Street Art, Music Fusion, The Orchard House series and Playing Away (1987) in which Caryl Phillips’ script had an all-black cricket team playing a whiter-than-white side in a very British village.
Ové’s work as a photographer was important, too, and he exhibited in many international shows. Oddly, it took him until 1984 to have the first solo exhibition by a black photographer – at London’s Photographers’ Galley. Work featuring black artists appeared at the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican, Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain. Another part of Ové’s career was in London theatre. He directed plays by Lindsay Barrett at the ICA, Wole Soyinka and Michael Abbensetts at the Cochrane Theatre in Holborn and he also toured for the British Council to Jamaica. Having worked solely in the UK, in 2009 he returned to Trinidad and filmed The Ghost of Hing King Estate, a mystery set in the Caribbean based on a true story.
Horace Ové had five children with his first wife Mary Irvine. His marriage to the producer Annabelle Alcazar ended in separation after 25 years. He received many awards – from the BFI, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Trinidad and Tobago where he won the Scarlet Ibis Medal and was declared to be a national icon. In 2007 he was awarded the CBE for his contribution to the UK film industry. It is sad, however, that after receiving his knighthood in 2022, he was in such poor health to be able to appreciate it.
MICHAEL DARVELL