Alvin Rakoff, who has died aged 97, left his native Canada in the early 1950s to become a prolific director of television plays in Britain, helping to pioneer small-screen drama during its formative years.
Single plays were his preferred format – he made dozens – and his legacy is best demonstrated in A Voyage Round My Father, a 1982 Emmy award-winning production of the writer John Mortimer’s autobiographical drama. Laurence Olivier played the cantankerous, eccentric, blind father in declining health, with Alan Bates as the devoted son who followed him into law while harbouring 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 dealing sensitively with Olivier’s own failing health and difficulty in remembering lines.
He was adept at coaxing the best out of actors and dealing with their emotions. When Michael Crawford made an early television appearance in the play The Move After Checkmate (1966), Rakoff needed to re-shoot a long scene for technical reasons. The actor was adamant he could not repeat it because he felt he had given his best performance, but Rakoff persuaded him to do another take. “As we finished the scene, Michael’s whole body sagged,” the director told me. “It was awful, terrible. He was just upset and near to tears.” Rakoff took Crawford to the director’s gallery, played him both takes and allowed the actor to choose the best. “The second one is miles better,” admitted Crawford. “I hope you have learned something from this,” Rakoff told him. “It’s difficult for you to judge for yourself – you must rely on other people.”
However, Rakoff had to admit defeat in one of his forays into feature films. Bette Davis, cast as the bitter matriarch of the Taggart family in the 1968 screen version of Bill MacIlwraith’s stage play The Anniversary, had a power of veto over the director. She did little to gain friends among fellow cast members, then on the first day of filming complained about Rakoff’s “television techniques” of “blocking” and “marking” his actors’ moves. A day after shooting began, she refused to appear on set, so Rakoff filmed scenes not involving her. However, production was halted 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 screen job, as Tybalt in the 1978 TV movie of Romeo & Juliet.
When Michael Caine wrote what Rakoff described as “begging letters” after taking a tiny part in Requiem for a Heavyweight, the director put him in army boots shot in close-up with titles superimposed over them for The Dark Side of the Earth (1959), a drama about the Hungarian revolution.
Born in Toronto, Alvin was the third of seven children of Pearl (nee Isenberg), who came from Rivne in Ukraine, and Samuel Rakoff, a shopkeeper from Voronezh in Russia.
Between 1949 and 1952, after graduating from the University of Toronto, Alvin worked as a journalist on various newspapers – the Northern Daily News, Kirkland, the Windsor Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Lakeshore Advertiser. Then he began writing for the fledgling CBC television network, whose drama department was run by Sydney Newman, later a significant figure in shaping TV drama in Britain.
After a short time Rakoff was seconded to BBC television in London, and was quick to make his mark. He wrote for the sketch show A Flight of Fancy (1952), starring Jimmy Young, and adapted, with Raymond Byrnes, the Irwin Shaw novel The Troubled Air (1953), about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witchhunts of alleged communists in the US.
The corporation spotted his talent, offered him a place on its directors’ course and, in 1953, his first job was 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 broke down. “I looked at the screen and made snap decisions on what to transmit,” he said.
When he adapted and directed the stage play Waiting for Gillian (1954), it won a Daily Mail National Television award – and he was invited to Paris to make it for French television.
From 1957 Rakoff worked freelance as a director and producer, most notably on play anthology series. When Newman became producer of ITV’s Armchair Theatre series in 1958, he resolved to concentrate on original drama for television, and Rakoff directed nine plays for it 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 award winner featuring Donald Pleasence and Judy Cornwell that he later remade as the feature film Hoffman (1970), starring Peter Sellers and Sinéad Cusack.
The BBC also used Rakoff for big occasions. In 1962 he was hired to make Heart to Heart, starring Ralph Richardson and Kenneth More, and specially written by Terence Rattigan as the corporation’s contribution to a series titled The Largest Theatre in the World, screened in nine countries. Two years later Rakoff directed Ken Taylor’s Seekers trilogy, commissioned by Newman – after switching channels – to mark the launch of BBC Two.
By the 1980s the single play was in decline. Rakoff directed Number 10 (1983), seven dramas exploring the personal lives of British prime ministers, and Paradise Postponed (1986), another semi-autobiographical work from 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 sequence about bohemian, upper-class England.
Rakoff also wrote three novels, including the autobiographical Baldwin Street (2007), about growing up above a store in a working-class Toronto neighbourhood, and two memoirs, I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action (2021) and I Need Another Take, Darling (2022).
In 1958 Rakoff married the actor Jacqueline Hill; she died in 1993. He is survived by his second wife, Sally Hughes, managing director of the Mill theatre in Sonning, Berkshire, whom he married in 2013, the two children of his first marriage, Sasha and John, a stepson, Adam, and a sister, Lorraine.
• Alvin Rakoff, director, writer and producer, born 6 February 1927; died 12 October 2024
