Peter Watkins, the radical British film-maker who won an Oscar for his controversial drama-documentary The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain, has died aged 90. In a statement, his family said he had died in hospital on Thursday in Bourganeuf, close to the small town of Felletin in central France, where he had lived for 25 years. They added: “The world of cinema loses one of its most incisive, inventive, and unclassifiable voices. We would like to thank all those who supported him throughout this long and sometimes solitary struggle.”
Watkins was an uncompromising figure who clashed with the BBC after the latter failed to show The War Game on broadcast TV, and subsequently led a peripatetic film-making existence, looking overseas for backing. He was wary of the press. In a rare interview he spoke to the Guardian in 2000, saying he was “someone who has been working for 30 years to help shift the power balance between public and TV”. He added: “Had TV taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just.”
