Obituary for Alvin Rakoff | drama

Alvin Rakoff, who has died aged 97, left his native Canada in the early 1950s to become a prolific television play director in Britain and pioneered the production of small-screen dramas in his formative years.

One-offs were his preferred format – he made dozens – and his legacy is best expressed in “A Journey for My Father,” an Emmy-winning 1982 production of writer John Mortimer’s autobiographical drama. Laurence Olivier played the cantankerous, eccentric blind father whose health was failing, with Alan Bates as the devoted son who succeeded him as father-in-law while also harboring ambitions as a writer. Rakoff directed much of the leisurely action between them in the large garden of Mortimer’s Buckinghamshire home – capturing the special bond between father and son while sensitively handling Olivier’s own failing health and difficulty remembering lines.

He was adept at getting the best out of the actors and handling their emotions. When Michael Crawford made an early television appearance in the play The Move After Checkmate (1966), Rakoff had to reshoot a long scene for technical reasons. The actor insisted that he could not repeat it because he felt he had given his best performance, but Rakoff persuaded him to do a different take. “When we finished the scene, Michael’s whole body slumped,” the director told me. “It was terrible, terrible. He was just upset and on the verge of tears.” Rakoff took Crawford to the director’s gallery, played him both takes, and let the actor choose the best one. “The second one is miles better,” admitted Crawford. “I hope you learned something from this,” Rakoff told him. “You find it difficult to judge for yourself – you have to rely on other people.”

However, Rakoff had to admit defeat in one of his forays into feature films. Bette Davis, who was cast as the embittered matriarch of the Taggart family in the 1968 film adaptation of Bill MacIlwraith’s stage play “The Anniversary,” had veto power over the director. She did little to win friends among the other cast members and then complained on the first day of filming about Rakoff’s “television techniques” of “blocking” and “marking” his actors’ movements. A day into filming, she refused to show up on set, so Rakoff filmed scenes that didn’t involve her. However, production stopped a day later and he was replaced by Roy Ward Baker.

Rakoff had a reputation for nurturing talent. He gave Sean Connery his first leading role in the 1957 television play Requiem for a Heavyweight and Alan Rickman his first film job as Tybalt in the 1978 television film Romeo and Juliet.

When Michael Caine wrote what Rakoff called “begging letters” after playing a small role in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” the director of “The Dark Side of the Earth” (1959) put him in close-ups with titles superimposed in army boots. , a drama about the Hungarian revolution.

Born in Toronto, Alvin was the third of seven children of Pearl (née Isenberg), who was from Rivne, Ukraine, and Samuel Rakoff, a shopkeeper from Voronezh, Russia.

Between 1949 and 1952, after graduating from the University of Toronto, Alvin worked as a journalist for various newspapers – the Northern Daily News, Kirkland, the Windsor Star, the Globe and Mail and the Lakeshore Advertiser. He then began writing for the fledgling CBC television network, whose drama department was headed by Sydney Newman, who later became a major figure in shaping television drama in Britain.

After a short time, Rakoff was seconded to BBC television in London and quickly made a name for himself. He wrote for the sketch show A Flight of Fancy (1952) with Jimmy Young in the lead role and, with Raymond Byrnes, adapted the Irwin Shaw novel The Troubled Air (1953) about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts against alleged communists in the USA.

The company recognized his talent, offered him a place on its director’s course and in 1953 he got his first job on Holiday Girl, a live broadcast of a beauty pageant from the Dome in Brighton. He proved adept at overcoming technical problems, abandoning his carefully prepared plans when a camera failed. “I looked at the screen and made spontaneous decisions about what to broadcast,” he said.

When he adapted and directed the play Waiting for Gillian (1954), it won a Daily Mail National Television Award – and he was invited to Paris to film it for French television.

From 1957 Rakoff worked freelance as a director and producer, primarily on play anthology series. When Newman became producer of ITV’s Armchair Theater series in 1958, he decided to concentrate on original dramas for television, and Rakoff directed nine plays for them over the next nine years. He also directed ITV Television Playhouse productions such as Harold Pinter’s The Room (1961) and Ernest Gébler’s Call Me Daddy (1967), an Emmy winner starring Donald Pleasence and Judy Cornwell, which he later adapted into a feature film with Hoffman (1970) remade by Peter Sellers and Sinéad Cusack.

The BBC also used Rakoff for major events. In 1962 he was hired to make Heart to Heart, starring Ralph Richardson and Kenneth More, which was written specifically by Terence Rattigan as the company’s contribution to a series entitled The Greatest Theater in the World, which was shown in nine countries. Two years later, Rakoff directed Ken Taylor’s Seekers trilogy, which Newman commissioned – after changing channels – to mark the launch of BBC Two.

By the 1980s, the singles game was in decline. Rakoff directed Number 10 (1983), seven dramas about the private lives of British prime ministers, and Paradise Postponed (1986), another semi-autobiographical work by Mortimer. He also created and directed the 1992 detective series Sam Saturday.

His swansong in 1997 was directing two episodes of A Dance to the Music of Time, Hugh Whitemore’s four-part adaptation for Channel 4 of Anthony Powell’s satirical 12-volume novel series about upper-class bohemian England.

Rakoff also wrote three novels, including the autobiographical Baldwin Street (2007), about growing up in a store in a working-class Toronto neighborhood, and two memoirs, I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action (2021) and I Need Another Take, Darling (2022).

In 1958 Rakoff married actress Jacqueline Hill; She died in 1993. He is survived by his second wife, Sally Hughes, managing director of the Mill Theater in Sonning, Berkshire, whom he married in 2013, the two children from his first marriage, Sasha and John, a stepson, Adam, and a sister, Lorraine.