As the elder son of a Texan oil millionaire, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the theatre director Michael Rudman, who has died aged 84, might have eased his way through business or politics to the highest echelons of either greasy pole. Instead, he caught the theatre bug, big time.
On vacation between Oberlin and Oxford he went to the Cannes film festival with his father – who had rejected Pablo Picasso’s offer of a free painting because he liked the guy much more than his art – and landed his first job as a stagehand with the radical New York collective Living Theatre, on their first European tour.
