Clive Donner(1926-2010)

British director Clive Donner was born in West Hampstead, London, England. By age 18 he was already working in the film business, as an office clerk at Denham Studios. He eventually became an editor and then graduated to the director's chair. After making a series of TV commercials, he made his theatrical directorial debut with Faux policiers (1957). In the 1960s he went from smaller, harder-edged black-and-white films to more commercial, "now" films, such as Trois petits tours et puis s'en vont (1968), Quoi de neuf Pussycat ? (1965) and the disastrous flop Alfred le Grand, vainqueur des Vikings (1969). He worked only sporadically in features after that--two more bombs, Le plus secret des agents secrets (1980) and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981) didn't help matters--and he returned, for the most part, to television. Among his best work there were a critically acclaimed filming of Frederic Raphael's thriller Chasse à l'homme (1976) and a faithful and well-received adaptation of Charles Dickens' famous novel, A Christmas Carol (1984) with George C. Scott as Scrooge. Unfortunately, that was followed by the notorious L'épée du sorcier (1985), a bizarre, convoluted and disjointed mess about which the less said, the better.