Despite his father’s best efforts to convince him otherwise, Andrew McLaglen was determined to make a name for himself in the television and film industry. “My father said, ‘The one thing I’m gonna advise you is don’t go in the pictures business. It’s disappointing, it’s hard work, it’s full of ups and downs, and I just suggest that you skip that’. Well, I didn’t take his suggestion. Instead, I wrote a letter to Herbert J Yates, the head of Republic Pictures.” McLaglen received a letter back saying, “Come to work”.
McLaglen went on to collaborate with many of Hollywood’s biggest names. He first worked with John Wayne as a young production assistant, when Wayne was the star ofDakota. It was the start of a fruitful partnership; as McLaglen became a respected film-maker in his own right they teamed up regularly. He directed five films with Wayne, four with James Stewart and a string of others with such Hollywood giants as Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, David Niven and Roy Rogers.
British-born McLaglen grew up in Hollywood — his father was the actor Victor McLaglen, with whom Wayne had a particularly memorable fist fight in John Ford’s classic 1952 comedy-drama The Quiet Man. The younger McLaglen was assistant director on the film. He gained experience directing hundreds of western episodes for television before focusing on films.
Highlights of his career included the 1963 comedy western McLintock!, which reunited Wayne with his Quiet Man leading lady Maureen O’Hara; the powerful 1965 American Civil War film Shenandoah; and the 1978 war film The Wild Geese, with Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Roger Moore.
McLaglen was never exactly an auteur, like John Ford, who became almost synonymous with Hollywood westerns. He said he ended up specialising in westerns by accident, but he gained a reputation with the studios for being “a safe pair of hands” and bringing films in on budget. The producer Darryl Zanuck put together the 1968 western Bandolero! on the strength of the headline cast of James Stewart, Dean Martin as his outlaw brother, and Raquel Welch for sex appeal. With only a six-page story outline, Zanuck trusted McLaglen sufficiently to pull it all together.
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Andrew Victor McLaglen was born in Wandsworth in London in 1920. His father headed for Hollywood when he was just a few years old and the family soon followed. Asked by an interviewer when he first realised his father’s job was “something other than ordinary work”, McLaglen said: “I think it was when he starred in Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonoured with Marlene Dietrich.” He recalled in his teens watching his father shooting the classic Raj adventure Gunga Din, with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. “It was quite an experience . . . I just kept out of the way because they were working hard; they had a picture to make! I had another school buddy with me at the time, we were 18 and 19 years old, and we had a terrific time.”
At 6ft 7in, McLaglen was deemed too tall for military service during the Second World War and worked for the aircraft company Lockheed. He began his own film career as an actor, but in 1945 he wrote the fateful letter to Yates, took a job as a production assistant with Republic Pictures and worked his way up through the ranks.
His stint as assistant director on The Quiet Man with his father, Wayne and Ford was an enlightening experience. He recalled “One of the first scenes that we shot was the scene when Wayne pulls Maureen through the fields . . . I went over to Ford and said, ‘Do you think we ought to clean up that sheep dung before Duke pulls Maureen through it?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘leave it!’ ”
McLaglen had known Wayne, who took him under his wing, since childhood. His company gave McLaglen his first chance to direct with the 1956 crime drama Man in the Vault. “Duke knew that I wanted to be a director,” McLaglen said. “So, one day he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you guys can put it together, I’ll guarantee the budget at the bank’.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s McLaglen was director on a number of different television series and directed around 100 episodes of both Gunsmoke and Have Gun — Will Travel.
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McLintock! and Shenandoah suggested he might have a glittering career ahead of him on the big screen too. In Shenandoah James Stewart gives one of his most powerful performances as a self-reliant Virginia farmer and patriarch who is gradually embittered as the Civil War encroaches on his land and his family.
According to McLaglen, Universal Pictures took some persuading that Shenandoah was anything more than a routine western. He said: “It turned out to be Universal’s biggest moneymaker of the year . . . I will never understand why Jimmy didn’t get at least a nomination for what he did.”
Wayne and Stewart liked working with McLaglen — perhaps because he readily accepted they were the ones with the Hollywood clout. But other actors found him a little unimaginative, with filming rushed and his sets intimidating. Raquel Welch complained that the atmosphere on Bandolero! was “very cliquish . . . the old John Ford gang”. Welch, who at the time was regarded as one of the most attractive women in the world, recalled that Stewart was one of the few who spoke to her. “I felt pretty lonely the whole shoot.”
McLaglen’s later credits include sequels to The Dirty Dozen and The Bridge on the River Kwai. He also directed the 1982 Civil War miniseries The Blue and the Gray.
He was married four times. Three marriages — first to Peggy Harrison, second to the actress Veda Ann Borg, and third to Sally Pierce — ended in divorce. His fourth wife, Sheila Greenan, predeceased him in 2005. With his second wife he had a son, who died in 2006. His three children from his first and third marriages followed him into the movie business — Sharon working as a script analyst, Josh as a producer, whose credits include Avatar and recent X-Men movies, and Mary who is also a producer.
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In the early 1990s McLaglen retired to San Juan Island in Washington State, where he had built his own house. Photos of him with Wayne, Stewart and Clint Eastwood adorned the walls. He worked with the local community theatre there and staged a version of Shenandoah.
Andrew McLaglen, television and film director, was born on July 28, 1920. He died on August 30, 2014, aged 94