Growing up in the African bush, Dyson Lovell decided he wanted to be a Shakespearean actor when he saw John Gielgud playing Richard II during a tour of colonial Rhodesia by the Old Vic company.
By the time he was 17 he was on a boat bound for England with the intention of auditioning for Rada. He duly won a place, was welcomed into Gielgud’s circle and had an affair with the actor Alan Bates.
On graduating from Rada in 1958 he joined the Old Vic and at 21 found himself on a six-month tour of North America with the company as understudy to Laurence Harvey’s Henry V.
His first film role came in 1963 with a small part in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s over-the-top Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Later he was cast in bizarre circumstances to play a shadowy assassin in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cult classic Blow-Up. When he was called for audition, Antonioni sat him on a chair, walked around him twice shaking his head and then left the room. A fortnight later he was called back and the ritual was repeated. Two days later he received a call to say he had got the job.
Yet ultimately it was not as a thespian but as a producer and casting director that he was to make his greatest impression on the acting world.
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He was shooting a small part in a 1967 episode of the television series The Avengers when out of the blue he took a call from Franco Zeffirelli asking him to cast his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Unsure about such a change of career path, he promised to ring back and asked the Avengers star Diana Rigg what he should do. “Well take it. Can’t be worse than this crap!” she told him.
Zeffirelli wanted a pair of unknown teenagers playing the star-crossed lovers and Lovell was given three months to find them with an instruction that they had to be “very young, very beautiful and very Italian-looking”.
He took out newspaper ads, pored over thousands of photos sent in by ambitious parents, auditioned hundreds of young hopefuls — including Phil Collins — and eventually cast the 16-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in the title roles.
Zeffirelli was so pleased that he invited Lovell to Italy to work on the picture as an assistant director. While they were filming, Laurence Olivier turned up to record the play’s prologue. “Any other voices you want me to do while I’m here, dear boy? I could also play Paris for you,” he said to Zeffirelli.
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Without thinking, Lovell blurted out: “Oh, you’re much too old.” An embarrassed silence followed before Olivier replied: “Well, you do it then.” And so Lovell voiced the part, played in the film by the Italian actor Roberto Bisacco.
He also appeared on screen as one of the quarrelling Capulets. It was his final appearance as an actor and he went on to become Zeffirelli’s right-hand man, working with him over the next three decades as a producer on Jesus of Nazareth, The Champ, Endless Love, Hamlet, Jane Eyre and Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
Word gets around fast in the film business and although Romeo and Juliet was Lovell’s first foray into casting, as soon as filming was finished he was asked by Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli to find a new James Bond, following Sean Connery’s decision after five films as 007 to step away.
“We offered it everywhere and nobody would touch it because nobody wanted to follow Connery,” Lovell wrote in an unpublished memoir. Eventually a talent agent rang him and said, “I’ve got someone in my office — he’s not an actor, but I think you should see him. He looks very good to me.”
It was George Lazenby and he got the role of 007 in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For good measure Lovell was also responsible for casting his old friend Diana Rigg and the unknown Joanna Lumley.
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He cast Albert Finney and later Peter Ustinov as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and picked Angela Lansbury to play Miss Marple in the 1980 adaptation of Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, for which he assembled an extraordinary support cast that included Tony Curtis, Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.
Playing Miss Marple led directly to Lansbury taking the role of Jessica Fletcher for 12 seasons in the hit TV series Murder, She Wrote. She subsequently told Lovell that she was forever in his debt for making her “a very wealthy woman”.
Other directors on whose pictures Lovell worked either as producer or casting director included Sidney Lumet (Murder on the Orient Express), Joseph Losey (Galileo), Francis Ford Coppola (The Cotton Club) and David Lean (A Passage to India). He thanked his original mentor Gielgud by casting him in both Galileo and Murder on the Orient Express.
Dyson Lovell was born in 1936 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. His mother, Helen, was a Scottish-born nurse and his father, William, owned a garage and petrol station in a hamlet in the bush called Banket. He was named after Dr Dyson Blair, who discovered a cure for bilharzia, a disease caused by parasitic worms that was endemic in parts of Africa. He grew up in a house built by his father with a tin roof and without running water or electricity.
At an all-white boys private prep school funded by Cecil Rhodes’s estate and at the elite Plumtree High School in Matabeleland, he was educated in the manner of a traditional British public school and excelled at almost everything, becoming head boy and taking the lead in school plays.
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At home the sturdy robustness of life in the bush meant he could ride a horse, drive a truck and shoot a gun before he was in his teens. He was mature beyond his years and his parents had no qualms about him heading for Britain unaccompanied when he was still legally a minor.
If Lovell, who is survived by his long-term partner, John Teall, harboured any disappointment that his acting ambitions were not fully realised, he never let it show. His role behind the scenes offered myriad compensations. To have discovered the 19-year-old Tom Cruise and handed him his film debut in Zeffirelli’s Endless Love was ultimately more satisfying than the kind of support roles that were likely to have been his lot if he had stayed on the other side of the camera.
His ability to pull together all-star casts was also much in demand on television and he broke the mould in convincing A-list film stars to appear on the small screen. Creating blockbuster big budget mini-series such as Lonesome Dove, Alice in Wonderland, Merlin and The Odyssey, he won multiple Emmys and Golden Globes with casts that included Robert Duvall, Danny Glover, Glenn Close, Patrick Stewart, Anjelica Huston, Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Kingsley.
There were wicked and often hilarious stories about those with whom he worked that made him irresistible company. His role as a producer included everything from preventing Mel Gibson and Zeffirelli from doing physical harm to each other to the impossible task of trying to keep Oliver Reed sober.
When Lovell cast Gibson as Hamlet in Zeffirelli’s 1990 adaptation, the actor was on the wagon and was upset by Zeffirelli drinking from a hip flask at ten in the morning. He was even angrier when the director insisted he should be “blonded up” for the role and the treatment turned his hair green and caused it to fall out in great chunks. Gibson summoned Lovell to his trailer and demanded that as the producer he should sack Zeffirelli on the spot.
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As for Reed, having persuaded him at the last minute to substitute for Nicol Williamson on the 1993 TV mini-series Return to Lonesome Dove, the notorious hell-raiser announced on arrival that he promised to stay sober until July 4. Unfortunately when the Independence Day weekend came around, they were still filming and Lovell ended up tracking Reed through a series of semi-destroyed bars, and eventually back in the bar of the hotel where the entire entourage was staying.
When Reed unzipped his fly and started waving his member about, the rest of the cast and crew were eager to see if it was true that he had thunderbolts tattooed down both sides of it, which according to Lovell it did. Another hotel guest told Reed his behaviour was a disgrace, at which point the actor punched him to the ground and was thrown out by security and banned from the hotel.
The following day, Lovell was astonished to receive a phone call from a totally non-contrite Reed who thanked him for “the wonderful experience”.
Dyson Lovell, film producer, was born on August 28, 1936. He died of cancer on January 11, 2024, aged 87
