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Kevin Billington, director who made his mark with radical documentaries in the 1960s and later with polished BBC adaptations and theatre – obituary

Kevin Billington on the set of Interlude, 1967 - Courtesy of Rachel Billington
Kevin Billington on the set of Interlude, 1967 - Courtesy of Rachel Billington

Kevin Billington, who has died aged 87, was in many ways the archetypal 1960s success story. From a working-class home in Warrington, he made his reputation as a director with a series of award-winning BBC documentaries throughout the decade, working first with the presenter Alan Whicker and then pioneering the no-narrator style that is now so ubiquitous.

Featured in the book The Young Meteors, Jonathan Aitken’s 1967 guide to who was who in swinging London, Billington cut quite a dash as he moved seamlessly into cinema and then over to Hollywood.

What had been a meteoric rise to that point, with the trappings of a Bentley and homes in London and Dorset, as well as (briefly) a place in the Hollywood Hills where the pool-man also worked for Elvis Presley, did not always go quite so smoothly when he was in Los Angeles. Yet any reverses in subsequent decades he bore with resilience and stoicism and so, over a 50-year career, created a substantial and widely admired body of work across television, film and theatre.

His transition into film began well with his 1968 remake of Douglas Sirk’s Interlude, the story of an interview between a famous conductor (played by Oskar Werner) and a young reporter (Barbara Ferris) that develops its own momentum. His next outing, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, a much-hyped 1970 satirical look at the world of spin doctors, starring Peter Cook and John Cleese, and produced by David Frost, received a poor reception but has gone on to achieve a cult status, with screenings at the BFI.

On television, Billington’s Henry VIII, with John Stride in the title role, was widely regarded as a highlight of the 1979 BBC Television Shakespeare Project, while his small-screen version of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier two years later – with the original Poldark, Robin Ellis – was enthusiastically hailed by the New York Times critic as “transposed to the television screen splendidly”.

Billington’s intelligence as a film-maker also shone through in the series of 12 films of Shakespeare sonnets that he made for the BBC in 1984, combining performances by big-name actors (Jane Lapotaire, Claire Bloom, Simon Callow) with commentary from the likes of Gore Vidal, Stephen Spender and Roy Strong.

They have survived the test of time, but his critically acclaimed 1992 BBC adaptation of Melvyn Bragg’s novel, A Time to Dance, about an affair between Ronald Pickup’s fiftysomething banker and a much younger woman (Dervla Kirwan), caused controversy over the sexual content.

Norman Rossington, Peter Cook and Julian Glover in The Rise and Rise Of Michael Rimmer (1970) directed by Kevin Billington - David Paradine Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock
Norman Rossington, Peter Cook and Julian Glover in The Rise and Rise Of Michael Rimmer (1970) directed by Kevin Billington - David Paradine Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock

Much of his later work was in the theatre with his brother-in-law, Harold Pinter (who as an actor had featured in Michael Rimmer), including directing Old Times at Dublin’s Gate Theatre as part of its 1994 Pinter Festival. The two men (their wives, the historian Antonia Fraser and the novelist Rachel Billington, are sisters) had similar humble backgrounds and neither suffered fools gladly. They got on very well and would holiday together. (Pinter and Antonia Fraser had met over dinner at the Billingtons’ London home.)

If Kevin Billington, though highly driven, ultimately did not quite hit the stellar heights on both sides of the Atlantic achieved by his 1960s contemporary, Ridley Scott, it was down to an uncompromising side, which could at times make him spikey in pursuit of his creative vision and too ready to drop out of promising projects.

Among these were a screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s Those Who Walk Away, and an Ingrid Bergman vehicle which came his way during his spell in vogue in Los Angeles. In mature years, mellow and always good company, he would express regret at not having taken them on, with the attendant compromises.

Kevin Billington was born on June 12 1934 and grew up with his younger sister in a two-up, two-down Catholic home in Warrington. His father, Richard, was a factory worker with British Aluminium, while his mother, Margaret, came from a large, originally Irish, clan. In what he regarded as a turning point in his life, at 13 he won a scholarship through his father’s company to go to Bryanston, a public school in Dorset, where he excelled in the classroom and the sports field in rugby and cricket.

After reading Economics at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he spent a year in Sweden, teaching English. After National Service he joined The Economist before getting into the BBC, where he was sent to work in radio at BBC Leeds. By the late 1950s, he had moved south to BBC Television in London, working his way up to making films for the flagship Tonight current-affairs show, hosted by Cliff Michelmore.

Longer projects followed, including Matador, about the Spanish bull-fighter, El Cordobés, which won the 1966 Bafta for Best Documentary, and Twilight of Empire (1964), made in India with the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. It was Muggeridge who claimed the credit for introducing the happy couple when in 1967 Billington married Lady Rachel Pakenham, daughter of the prison reform campaigner (and Muggeridge’s friend and neighbour) Lord Longford, at that time the Leader of the House of Lords, where the reception took place.

The couple had met in New York, where she was working as a researcher with ABC Television and Billington was completing what turned out to be his final documentary, Madison Avenue, USA, a look at the “mad men” of the advertising industry.

After Michael Rimmer, he took on The Light at the Edge of the World, a big-budget, big-name epic based on a Jules Verne story. It was filmed on location in northern Spain, starring Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner; Salvador Dali, who lived nearby, would drop in on to check on progress.

Based back in England from the early 1970s, where the first of the couple’s four children was born, Billington directed the Anglo-American funded TV movie And No One Could Save Her (1973) with Lee Remick and Milo O’Shea and four years later the US drama-documentary, Once Upon a Time is Now… The Story of Princess Grace.

In the 1980s he worked mainly in television. With both The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1981), based on the life of the anti-apartheid activist, and the London stage version and then television adaptation of The Deliberate Death of a Polish Priest, a 1986 account of the murder of a pro-Solidarity cleric, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, he was increasingly drawn as a director to more serious subjects, which reflected his own preoccupations.

The Catholicism of his childhood, which he shared with his wife, remained an important part of his make-up throughout his life. It gave him comfort when their oldest son, Nat, a successful tech entrepreneur with two young children, died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 44.

Though not by nature a joiner of councils and commissions, Kevin Billington served in various roles at Bafta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including two years as chairman. When directing roles became fewer, he refocused the energy and curiosity that he retained until near the end into another great passion, classical music, studying for a degree in a subject dear to his heart, Beethoven.

He is survived by his wife and three surviving children, Rose, Chloe and Caspar.

Kevin Billington, born June 12 1934, died December 13 2021