As Desmond Davis hit his late thirties, he was convinced that his chances of becoming a film director had gone.
An industry veteran with 20 years’ experience, he had worked as a clapper boy on the 1951 classic The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and had gone on to become the first choice camera operator for the directors John Huston and Tony Richardson, collaborating with them on setting up each shot.
His partnership with Richardson was particularly fruitful as together they made such seminal early-1960s films as A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which helped to usher in a new era in British cinema.
“I loved being a camera operator,” Davis said. “You were close to the actors and you were working next to the director and you needed a sixth sense for timing, otherwise you were lost. It was a wonderful and elevating job.”
He longed for promotion to director but “couldn’t see it happening, having worked on cameras for so long”.
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However, in 1963 he was working with Richardson on his adaptation of Tom Jones, which won four Oscars, when one night after shooting, the director tossed him a book. “You want to direct, don’t you, Desmond?” he asked. “Have a look at this and see if you think it would make a film.”
As Davis later recalled in a platform interview with the British Film Institute, it was a “life-changing moment”. The book was Edna O’Brien’s recently published second novel, The Lonely Girl, and when Richardson enthused about its sensitively told story of a young, naive country girl’s romance with an older married man, Richardson commissioned him to direct the picture for his production company, Woodfall.
Davis employed O’Brien to write the screenplay, which led to an enduring friendship and they later collaborated on a 1983 television adaptation of her first novel The Country Girls.
He then cast Rita Tushingham, with whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, as the girl, Lynn Redgrave as her best friend and Peter Finch as the older man. Shot in Dublin, on its release in 1964 the film was retitled Girl with Green Eyes. Given that it was in black and white, the title left the colouring of Tushingham’s eyes to the viewer’s imagination. Fortunately, it also meant nobody could see the red eyes with which Davis reported Finch would habitually appear on set after a night on the town. One morning a particularly hungover Finch told him, “You know, mate, I could really f*** you up if I wanted to.”
He chose not to do so and put in a finely nuanced performance that helped Davis to win the US National Board of Review award for best director with his first picture.
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The film launched a prolific career directing for television and the big screen, culminating in Clash of the Titans (1981), a spectacular deep dive into Greek myth in which he directed a rich cast of thespians including Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Maggie Smith, Siân Phillips, Claire Bloom and Tim Pigott-Smith. Between them they added a Shakespearean gravitas to the animated monsters, special effects and Ursula Andress’s pulchritudinous performance as Aphrodite.
Indeed, the diffident, softly spoken Davis was chosen by the producers on the back of his direction of the BBC’s television production of Measure for Measure. One of the first and best productions in the series that put Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre on screen between 1978 and 1985, one critic wrote that Davis’s realistic direction made it seem that the play had been “written for television”.
It earned him a shot at directing the film written by Maggie Smith’s husband, Beverley Cross, and produced by the Hollywood veterans Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen. Clash of the Titans had initially run into difficulties when one studio dropped the project during pre- production as too expensive and another refused to fund it unless Arnold Schwarzenegger played the king of the gods. In the end, MGM took the picture on and the combination of a cast of classical British stage actors and the direction of Davis was a masterstroke. Clash of the Titans became one of the year’s biggest-grossing films. Pigott-Smith wrote in his autobiography Do You Know Who I Am? that Davis had “great sweetness of nature but is made of steel and can, if need be, push his team hard”. The need arose and he shot the scenes involving his stellar cast of thespian gods in eight days.
In 2010 a remake of Clash of the Titans starring Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson appeared in full 3D. It was a huge box-office hit but critics compared it unfavourably with Davis’s 1981 take.
His later work included a splendid 1984 feature film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence starring Donald Sutherland and Faye Dunaway, and television adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four with Ian Richardson as Sherlock Holmes and Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias starring Greta Scacchi and Colin Firth.
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He retired from film-making in 1994 but as a grand old man of British cinema continued as a Bafta judge into his nineties.
His marriage to Shirley Ann (née Smith), who also worked in the film industry, ended in divorce. He is survived by their son, Tim, a clinical psychologist. Away from the film set he was a voracious reader with a love of poetry and the novels of Raymond Chandler and a passionate animal lover.
Desmond Stanley Tracey Davis was born in London in 1926, the younger of two children to Dorothy and William Davis, who worked for his wife’s family firm, H Newbold, developing specialist optical lenses.
After a Catholic education at Wimbledon College and Belmont Abbey, Herefordshire, he enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Photography and Cinematography. He graduated in 1944 and joined Riverside studios in Hammersmith as a clapper boy, the lowliest member of a film camera crew.
The following year he was called up into the army. Seconded to the Army Film and Photographic Unit, he underwent six weeks of training in battle photography at Pinewood Studios and was posted as a sergeant cameraman to southeast Asia, where he filmed the liberation of British soldiers from Japanese PoW camps. The footage is held at the Imperial War Museum.
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His most traumatic war experience came not in battle but defending warehouses in Jakarta that contained vital supplies for the troops but which were subject to pilfering raids by the near-starving local population.
Wire barricades were erected with signs warning that trespassers would be fired upon without hesitation. One night a would-be intruder was shot cutting through the wire.
“I ran forward with the platoon, my camera running and tracking down on to a figure that lay on the ground,” Davis recalled.
To his horror, it was a seven- year-old boy. “His dead eyes stared into mine. I shot hundreds of close-ups. But to this day I only remember one with clarity. His eyes still look up at me.”
On his discharge in 1949, he continued as a clapper boy but his army experiences held him in good stead as he rose to focus puller and then a camera operator. Having first encountered Huston as a clapper boy while making The African Queen he became his chief cameraman on his 1962 biopic Freud, starring Montgomery Clift and Susannah York.
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After Davis’s directorial debut, Tushingham and Redgrave remained favourites and he cast them together again in Smashing Time (1967), a comedy of manners set in swinging London. A long hiatus from the big screen followed and he spent the 1970s working mostly in television, directing episodes of The New Avengers, the First World War drama Wings and Play for Today and overseeing adaptations of all three novels in LP Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy.
Once he became a director, his long experience as a camera operator meant that his own crew held him in the highest esteem. While working on Clash of the Titans, Pigott-Smith recalled one young cameraman telling him with undisguised awe that “Des can do anything with a camera”.
Desmond Davis, cameraman and film director, was born on May 24, 1926. He died on July 3, 2021, aged 95