Hugh Whitemore obit

Hugh Whitemore obituary

This article is more than 6 years old

Dramatist and screenwriter who enjoyed success with Stevie, Breaking the Code and The Gathering Storm 

He was not on the list.

The dramatist and screenwriter Hugh Whitemore, who has died aged 82, was an accomplished craftsman for theatre and TV for more than 50 years, moving easily between the disciplines and writing major stage roles (usually based on real-life characters) for Glenda Jackson, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Derek Jacobi. Having started out with ambitions as a performer, he was told by one of his teachers at Rada, the actor Peter Barkworth, that he had the potential to make a great contribution to theatre – “though perhaps not as an actor”.

And so it proved. He was busy in television from the early 1960s, contributing to such important one-off drama series as the BBC’s Play for Today and ITV’s Armchair Theatre, as well as to popular series such as the soap opera Compact, set in the world of magazine publishing, and No Hiding Place, one of the earliest police and crime fictional programmes (starring Raymond Francis as Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Lockhart) to run counter to the early-evening cosiness of Jack Warner as the old bobby on the beat in Dixon of Dock Green.

It was not long before Whitemore was making a name for himself on more prestigious projects, and not a little of this was down to his affability and considerable charm, as well as to his professionalism and graft. An inherently funny man, he was a writer of silky dialogue and well-turned narrative who won the respect, as well as the friendship, of fellow writers such as Harold Pinter, Simon Gray and Ronald Harwood. Like Pinter and Harwood, he benefited hugely from his own background and experience as a professional actor; he knew what “worked” and, more importantly, what actors could comfortably say. And his themes, more often than not, were friendship and betrayal.

Whitemore was an only child, born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to Kathleen (nee Fletcher) and Samuel Whitemore. He was educated at King Edward VI school in Southampton. After Rada, and registering little success on regional theatre stages, he began writing, winning the first of his three Emmy awards for an episode of Jackson’s Elizabeth R series in 1970 and establishing himself as a reliable adapter of popular classics, such as David Copperfield (1974) in six episodes, with David Yelland in the title role, Anthony Andrews as Steerforth and Arthur Lowe as Mr Micawber, and a 90-minute BBC Moll Flanders (1975) starring Julia Foster.

He sidled into playwriting with Stevie (1977) at the Vaudeville, a vehicle devised for Jackson as the eccentric poet of Palmers Green, Stevie Smith, flanked by Mona Washbourne as her aunt and Peter Eyre as various literary figures. Thanks to Jackson’s unexpected mixture of acerbity and wry melancholy, the show was a big success, and was made into a 1980 film directed by Robert Enders. The Royal Shakespeare Company associate Clifford Williams was Whitemore’s stage director, and he ensured a smooth delivery of the next two plays, Pack of Lies (1983) at the Lyric and Breaking the Code (1986) at the Haymarket.

In the first, Dench and her husband Michael Williams played the Jacksons, a suburban couple – this time in Ruislip – who, in 1960, had innocently befriended their neighbours, the American spies the Krogers. Originally a TV play called Act of Treachery, Pack of Lies threw a light on the extraordinary undercover business of Gordon Lonsdale and the Portland spy ring through the prism of personal trust and friendship; when Dench’s Mrs Jackson – a character based on the mother of the journalist Gay Search, who brought the story to Whitemore – slumped in disbelief and despair at discovering the truth of her relationship with Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s Mrs Kroger, the bottom had fallen out of her world, while the lid was put back on our national security.

And in Breaking the Code, a similar, reverse sort of poignancy was achieved in the story of the Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing – beautifully and touchingly played by Jacobi – serving his country with his genius before being hounded into hormone treatment and suicide (in 1954) because of his homosexuality. Both of these powerful, urgently humane plays were subsequently developed for television. The Best of Friends (1988) at the Apollo, directed by James Roose-Evans, gave Gielgud his last stage role, as Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, in an extraordinary three-way correspondence with the Abbess of Stanbrook, Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Rosemary Harris), and George Bernard Shaw (Ray McAnally); Alvin Rakoff directed the play for television in 1991 with Gielgud now supported by Wendy Hiller and Patrick McGoohan.

Whitemore never achieved comparable success in the theatre thereafter, but It’s Ralph (1991) at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter) provided a good role for Timothy West in top form as a television pundit visited by an old leftwing friend (Jack Shepherd) as a kind of agent of guilt in his personal and professional life; and A Letter of Resignation (1997), directed by Christopher Morahan at the Comedy and, later, the Savoy, drew an amusing and sympathetic performance from Edward Fox as Harold Macmillan, weighing his wife Dorothy’s (Clare Higgins) affair with his friend and colleague Lord Boothby in the moral scales against John Profumo’s lie to the House of Commons over his affair with Christine Keeler.

These plays can now be viewed as the start of a genre that is all-pervasive today, the analysis of our recent history through the personal conduct of its main characters and unwitting participants.

Over the same period, Whitemore was writing television drama along similar lines: Concealed Enemies (1984) was a complex examination of spying, perjury and cold war cynicism in the story of Alger Hiss (played by Edward Herrmann) that won him a second Emmy; The Final Days (1989) was an acclaimed adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book about Richard Nixon; and The Gathering Storm (2002), which won him both an Emmy and a Golden Globe, featured a politically alert study of the marriage of Winston and Clementine Churchill as played by Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave.

There were film scripts for David Jones’s 84 Charing Cross Road (1986, with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as Helene Hanff’s unlikely letter-writers) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996) with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg. But his best later work for the screen was undoubtedly the Channel 4 version of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1997) starring Simon Russell Beale as Widmerpool, and Richard Loncraine’s television film of My House in Umbria (2003), with an Emmy award-winning performance from Maggie Smith as William Trevor’s blocked alcoholic writer redefining herself as a hostess to her fellow survivors in a train bomb attack.

Another play for Jacobi, God Only Knows (2000), on the discovery in some Vatican archives that the Resurrection never happened, misfired at the Vaudeville. But Whitemore’s productivity, if not his strike rate, remained high: Kristin Scott Thomas and Bob Hoskins led a classy revival of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, which he translated for the director Jonathan Kent in 2005; with an ailing Gray, he dramatised the latter’s Smoking Diaries as The Last Cigarette (2009), directed by Richard Eyre at Chichester and in the Trafalgar Studios (Gray’s musings on mortality and love were voiced by an oddly compelling trio of Jasper Britton, Nicholas Le Prevost and Felicity Kendal); and Anthony Andrews played Anthony Eden during the 1956 Suez crisis in A Marvellous Year for Plums (2012) at Chichester, while Le Prevost as Hugh Gaitskell conducted an affair with Ian Fleming’s wife, Anne.

Whitemore’s last play was Sand in the Sandwiches (2016), a solo show for Edward Fox as John Betjeman, an unlikely conjunction of actor and poet, less successful than that of Glenda Jackson and Stevie Smith.

Whitemore served as a council member at Rada, and was made FRSL in 1999 and an honorary fellow of King’s College London in 2006.

He was twice divorced, and is survived by his third wife, the actor Rohan McCullough, whom he married in 1998, and his son, Tom, from his second marriage, to the literary agent Sheila Lemon.

 Hugh John Whitemore, playwright and screenwriter, born 16 June 1936; died 17 July 2018.

 

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1992

 

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1975

 

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1975

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1973

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1972

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1972

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1972

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1972

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1972

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1971

 

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1971

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1971

 

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1971

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1971

1 episode

 

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1970

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1970

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5.8

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script

1969

1 episode

 

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screenplay

1969

 

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1968

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1968

 

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6.7

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1968

1 episode

 

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7.4

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writer

1966–1968

4 episodes

 

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7.5

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1967

1 episode

 

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7.5

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1966

2 episodes

 

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7.1

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1965

2 episodes

 

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1965

1 episode

 

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6.8

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writer

1965

8 episodes

 

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writer

1965

1 episode

 

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8.4

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1963

1 episode

 

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1962

 

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7.5

TV Series

story

1962

1 episode

 

Producer

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TV Movie

co-producer

2009

 

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7.5

TV Mini Series

executive producer

1997

4 episodes

 

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5.5

TV Special

Self - Winner

2002