Mick Sadler’s fellow writer-performers at Oxford, including the future Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones, were shocked when he announced one day that he was intending to forsake a potentially brilliant career in comedy in favour of one in academia.
“He was very distinctive,” Palin recalled, “with a round expressive face and a head of fair curly hair which gave him the air of an absent-minded professor. He was energetic, both intellectually and physically, and his slightly protruding eyes sparkled as ideas spilled out of him.”
The two acted in various shows and Palin directed him in The Oxford Line, the university revue at the Edinburgh Festival in 1965. “Mick’s forte was playing with words and ideas. He had a fine sense of the surreal, turning the mundane domestic world on its head — a couple who’d won the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon and didn’t know where they were going to hang them, a cat who’d been wrongly adjusted and could only go sideways.” He was a clever physical performer, too. “One of his tours de force was the conductor of an orchestra whose baton becomes a knitting needle, a starting-handle, a dipstick, a nail file and finally a sword elaborately wielded before running through an imaginary assailant over whom he steps, bows to the audience and goes off.”
But it wasn’t to be, and comedy’s loss was academia’s gain. After graduating in 1965, Sadler stayed on at his college, Magdalen, to read for a doctorate in French and German literature. He then took up a post as lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. There he met and married Lulu Chabriais, in 1970, and the couple spent only two nights apart in the next 52 years.
In 1979 they moved to France, where he became professor of French literature at the University of London Institute in Paris, specialising in contemporary film and theatre. Notwithstanding a heavy teaching schedule, he continued to write prolifically. Translations of Marivaux and Musset into English were accompanied by academic articles, some more tongue-in-cheek than others. “The role of soup in French cinema between 1938 and 1953” was never meant to be received with great solemnity.
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Completely bilingual, he was one of the few non-French writers aside from Samuel Beckett to adopt French as effectively his first language. In 1996 he co-wrote the screenplay for a French film, C’est Jamais Loin, starring Jean-Louis Tringtignant.
There followed three comic novels which explored his love of French food, wine and culture. He translated them into English himself, occasionally ringing up an English friend to be reminded how best to say this or that in his slightly rusty native tongue. The books were published in the UK by Simon & Schuster, the first of them bringing a handwritten letter from the Prince of Wales, saying that he hadn’t laughed so hard in years.
Michael Peter Sadler was born in Lewes, East Sussex, in 1943, the son of Joan Sadler, a writer, and Brian Sadler, a civil servant. He attended Lewes Grammar School and completed his doctoral thesis on the French symbolist poets in Paris. During the riots of 1968, he had to abandon a rehearsal of The Importance of Being Earnest because of tear gas in the room.
At Oxford, despite his announcement about becoming an academic, he had continued to write, direct and perform in various productions for the university’s Oxford Theatre Group. During the Seventies he wrote several quirky radio plays which were championed and directed by the BBC producer John Tydeman, one of them winning a Sony award. He also wrote a handful of television plays, two of which were directed by Philip Saville, and attracted star names including Diana Rigg, Geraldine McEwan and Arthur Lowe.
In France Sadler was taken up by Bernard Pivot, the country’s unofficial literary czar, who presided over the influential television show Apostrophes. This led to his becoming something of a media personality. He was a regular contributor to Le Fou du Roi, a daily two-hour show on France Inter, where participants gossiped, provoked and fought to top each other’s jokes.
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In 1993 he received a call from Barry Hanson, who had produced one of his television plays on BBC2 years earlier. The corporation had acquired the rights to Peter Mayle’s bestseller A Year In Provence, and wondered if Sadler would be interested in adapting it as a 12-part series starring John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan. It was a daunting prospect because even though the book had lots of charm as a diary there was no evident storyline. Sadler worked diligently and with great skill on the project. The result was poorly received in the UK, yet became a hit in America.
Shortly before the turn of the century, while staying with their friend David Ambrose in Provence, he and Lulu met the actor John Malkovich, who had a house near by. Malkovich, who spoke good French though less fluently than Sadler, was keen to direct the English play Hysteria by Terry Johnson in Paris with the actor Pierre Vaneck playing Sigmund Freud.
Mick and Lulu Sadler were signed up to make a French translation of the play, which opened in 2002 and ran for six months at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs Élysées. Malkovich and the Sadlers went on to collaborate on an American play, Good Canary, which opened in Paris in 2007. The production won a “best of year” award and the Sadlers a “best adaptation” award at the Molières, the French equivalent of the Oliviers.
In 2006 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur for services to literature and the arts. The presentation took place at the British embassy in Paris. In his acceptance speech Sadler thanked, among others, his late mother Joan for infecting him with her own love of theatre. A largely self-educated woman, her dream of being a playwright had been thwarted by constant rejection letters, until one day in the mid-1950s she was informed that not only had her new play been accepted by a leading management, but it was to be directed by Peter Hall and would star Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
It was a dream realised, but short-lived when the play closed on tour without reaching the West End. It nevertheless gave Sadler as well as his mother a sense of the thrill of it all, something that never left him and which he successfully passed on to his director-screenwriter daughter, Daisy.
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A good observer on the differences between the French and the Rosbifs, his last play, Brexit Sentimental, will be performed posthumously at the Avignon Festival this summer. It is about an English couple and a French couple at a dinner party in the French countryside on the evening of the referendum.
Sadler was a boisterous, gregarious and generous personality who died after suffering a heart attack over lunch. At the time he was raising a glass to toast an old friend’s birthday.
Michael Sadler, academic, was born on January 11, 1943. He died of heart failure on February 23, 2022, aged 79