Charles Jarrott worked with some distinction in British television and film in the 1960s and early 1970s and was subsequently lured to Hollywood, where he enjoyed a lucrative career and directed such stars as Peter Finch, Susan Sarandon and Nicolas Cage.
Jarrott initially made his mark on the big screen in Britain with old-fashioned historical films. He may not have been tapping into the zeitgeist of auteurs and kitchen-sink dramas, but he won a Golden Globe for his debut film Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), which starred Geneviève Bujold as Anne Boleyn and Richard Burton as Henry VIII.
Jarrott returned to much the same period of British history with Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), with Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Glenda Jackson reprising the role of Elizabeth I, with which she had recently made such an impact on television in Elizabeth R.
In Hollywood Jarrott took charge of Columbia’s big-budget musical version of Lost Horizon (1973), featuring Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, John Gielgud and songs by Bacharach and David. Both the treatment and the songs turned out to be rather camp, and the film was a box-office disaster. The American critic Pauline Keal said that Jarrott had no personality or style of his own and dismissed him as a “traffic manager”. But despite the failure of Lost Horizon he went on to make several films for Disney, including Condorman (1981), a light-hearted family entertainment, starring Michael Crawford as the eponymous superhero, and latterly he directed a string of big-budget dramas and melodramas for US television.
Born in London in 1927, Jarrott came from a colourful household. His father, also Charles Jarrott, was not only a successful businessman, but one of Britain’s top drivers in the early days of motor racing. His book Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing (1906) is now a collector’s item. Jarrott’s mother was a singer and dancer.
Advertisement
Towards the end of the Second World War, Jarrott enlisted in the Royal Navy and served in the Far East. Once demobbed he gained experience as an actor and director with Nottingham Repertory Theatre, before furthering his career in Canada with Ottawa Theatre and then in Canadian television. While in Canada, he met the South African actress Katharine Blake, who became his wife and often worked with him.
Back in the UK at the start of the 1960s he directed a wide range of one-off television plays, often for the ABC Armchair Theatre and BBC Wednesday Play slots. He directed Johnny Speight’s play If There Weren’t Any Blacks You’d Have to Invent Them (1968), which returned to themes Speight had explored with the Alf Garnett character in Till Death Us Do Part.
In the ITV Sunday night play MacNeil (1969) he provided Sean Connery — after James Bond had turned him into an international star — with a rare chance to return to television in a gritty role as a widowed carpenter. He also made a memorable version of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1968) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with Jack Palance.
The producer Hal B. Wallis was sufficiently impressed to entrust him with directing duties on Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots, which led in turn to Lost Horizon, a musical adaptation of James Hilton’s story of travellers who stumble by accident on the lost civilisation of Shangri-La. It was a great story, with great actors and a great songwriting team, but the songs managed to be both overly jolly and banal at the same time. Yet they still crop up on the radio, and the film affords a certain guilty pleasure.
Jarrott weathered the storm, made The Dove (1974), with Joseph Bottoms as a teenage yachtsman, and began his association with Disney on Escape from the Dark (1976), a period piece about children who steal Yorkshire pit ponies to save them from being put down.
Advertisement
He directed the young Susan Sarandon in The Other Side of Midnight (1977) and a youthful Nicolas Cage in The Boy in Blue (1986). In the late 1980s and early 1990s Jarrott directed glossy dramas for American television about Eisenhower, Pope John XXIII, Barbara Hutton, Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Latterly he lived in the film industry’s retirement community in Woodland Hills, California.
He was married several times but had no known children.
Charles Jarrott, film and television director, was born on June 16, 1927. He died of prostate cancer on March 4, 2011, aged 83