MALCOLM MOWBRAY
(24 June 1949 - 23 June 2023)
The English TV and film director and screenwriter Malcolm Mowbray has died from complications arising from dementia, a day before his 74th birthday. He was born in Knebworth in Hertfordshire to Arnold, a dentist, and Betty Mowbray. Following education at Sherrardswood School in Welwyn Garden City, he studied fine art, painting, sculpture and animation at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in Greenwich, before going to the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.
His graduation film was Path of the Weft (1975), based on Muriel Spark’s novel Not to Disturb, which attracted the attention of David Puttnam. For the BBC, he directed Hanging Around, from a script by Barrie Keeffe, and then directed his own play, Days at the Beach, about soldiers guarding an unexploded mine. Then he did Our Winnie, from a series of five plays by Alan Bennett called Objects of Affection, concerning a handicapped woman who lives with her mother and an aunt.
Two years later there was more Alan Bennett with the writer’s first screenplay, A Private Function. It was actually Mowbray’s idea to make a film about the post-war ration-book era, but he didn’t want to write it himself. He and Bennett wrote it about a local Northern butcher trying to mark the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip by raising a pig for the occasion, but the pig gets stolen. Mowbray shot it like an Ealing comedy with Michael Palin and Maggie Smith, and it won three Baftas and nominations for best screenplay and best film. They also shared the Evening Standard British Film Award for best screenplay.
Butchery also appeared in Mowbray’s 1989 film Out Cold, a black comedy in which an errant husband, Ernie (Bruce McGill), has a fight with his partner Dave (John Lithgow) in their butcher’s shop. Ernie is knocked out and dies and his wife (Teri Garr) then plans to get rid of any witnesses. Other Mowbray films included The Boyfriend School (aka Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, 1990), a romcom with Steve Guttenberg as a man recovering from cancer and looking for a new woman. For The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) Mowbray co-wrote the script with Alan Ayckbourn about a couple (Sam Neill and Helena Bonham Carter) who are about to jump off Tower Bridge. One saves the other and they get together to wreak revenge on their enemies.
The last feature Mowbray directed was Meeting Spencer about a failed Hollywood director (Jeffrey Tambor) trying to re-launch his Broadway career. Then Mowbray mainly directed TV episodes of Once Upon a Time in the North with Bernard Hill, Crocodile Shoes with Jimmy Nail, Cadfael with Derek Jacobi, Pie in the Sky, with Richard Griffiths as a copper-turned-chef, and Monsignor Renard with John Thaw as a French wartime priest. Mowbray ended his career as Head of Directing at the Northern Film School in Leeds from 2016. He was married to Valerie Hill from 1977 until her death in 2006. They had met as students at the Ravensbourne University and had two sons.
MICHAEL DARVELL