Tristram Powell, brilliant director who flourished in the golden age of BBC arts coverage – obituary

Tristram Powell, who has died aged 83, was a film, television and occasional stage director who became a great favourite with artists and writers during the heyday of BBC Television arts documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s.

Moving on from such series as Omnibus and Arena, he collaborated with leading writers on television and radio dramas and demonstrated a gift for suspense, directing episodes of such series as Law and Order, Foyle’s War, Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution, Judge John Deed and Kavanagh QC.

The elder of two sons of the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time, and his wife Lady Violet, née Pakenham, daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, Tristram had a cultured and literary upbringing which gave him an unusually sympathetic understanding of how creative people think and work.

His willingness to listen, his inquiring mind and his quietly spoken capacity for friendship allowed him to secure television interviews with some of the most interesting cultural figures of the 20th century and enabled him to get the best out of them as a film-maker. His interviews with Marcel Duchamp and particularly Lucian Freud are practically the only ones in existence.

His collaborators included Alan Bennett, with whom he worked on several 30-minute Talking Heads monologues (1988) – a huge directorial challenge, as any small slip would mean the whole thing had to be filmed again. Powell recalled Bennett sitting at the back of the studio, wringing his handkerchief with tension and sometimes chewing it.

During the filming of “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” with Penelope Wilton, the writer was said to have swallowed his handkerchief whole.

Powell also directed Bennett’s monologue series of reminiscences, Telling Tales (2000), and their friendship led the playwright to agree to resuscitate Denmark Hill, a darkly comic television play which had been turned down by the BBC in the early 1980s then forgotten about until Powell unearthed it in the Bodleian Library and asked if Bennett would be game for giving it a second shot.

The play finally made it into the public sphere as Radio 4’s Saturday Drama in 2014, with the writer himself playing narrator and filling in the visual gaps in his characteristic mournful timbre.

Powell also became close to Michael Palin, collaborating with him on East of Ipswich (BBC Two, 1987), a comedy starring John Nettleton and Pat Heywood about a grisly family holiday at a Suffolk seaside resort.

They went on to work together on Palin’s first feature film, the award-winning American Friends (1991), a gentle comedy based on diaries kept by Palin’s great-grandfather and starring Palin as a stuffy, 19th-century Oxford don whose holiday in Switzerland is ruined when he becomes romantically entangled with two American ladies who threaten to destroy his career in misogynistic Oxford by following him back to England.

Lucian Freud, about whom Powell had made a thoughtful film in the 1970s, painted Powell’s portrait in 1995-96. “He’s very sympathetic, lively and intelligent, and in a curious way he’s abandoned,” Freud told the Times’s Richard Cork in 1996. Powell’s eyes, he added, were “beautifully cut, like high-class binoculars, and they seem extraordinarily observant.”

Tristram Roger Dymoke Powell was born in Oxford on April 25 1940 and brought up in Regent’s Park, London, after a short period of being evacuated as a baby to Dunstall Priory in Kent, home of his “Uncle Eddie”, the writer and dramatist Lord Dunsany. In 1952, when Tristram was 12, the family moved to The Chantry, a country home near Frome in Somerset.

From an early age he was fascinated by broadcasting. His grandfather gave him a tape recorder with which he made spoofs of such radio programmes as Critics’ Forum and What’s My Line? At Eton, he and his friend, the future actor Jonathan Cecil, made short comic films together.

At Trinity College, Oxford, he read modern history, though he later regretted that he had not chosen to go to film school instead. After graduation he worked as a sub-editor for Queen magazine alongside Betty Kenward of Jennifer’s Diary.

He began his television career with BBC Two on its launch in 1964 as a production assistant, then director, on Take It or Leave It, a panel game chaired by Alan Brien, before becoming director of New Release (1965-7), a short-lived fortnightly arts magazine edited by Melvyn (now Lord) Bragg, whom he had met at Oxford and who became a lifelong friend.

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden period for arts coverage, when BBC directors were allowed to follow their own interests, and Powell embarked on an astonishing range of films about artists and writers.

Rebel Ready-Made (1966) was a fascinating study of Marcel Duchamp, featuring a rare interview with the elderly artist. The same year he secured another rare interview with Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer and saloniste, famous for her insistence on living openly as a lesbian. In 1968 he made a film about Japan’s bestselling novelist, Yukio Mishima, presciently titled A Writer and His Sword – two years before Mishima committed ritual suicide after a failed coup attempt.

In 1972, with the art critic and writer Bill Feaver, he brought the “Pitmen Painters” of Ashington Colliery in Northumberland to public attention, and worked with young Patti Smith and Jonathan Miller on an impression of New York called West Side Stories; in 1973 he worked with Marcel Marceau on Marcel Marceau Presents a Christmas Carol, a mime version of Dickens’s story for Omnibus; I Build My Time (1975) looked at the time the German Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters spent in the Lake District as a refugee during the Second World War; Mucha (1975) examined the life and work of the Czech art nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha.

In 1977 he worked with Samuel Beckett on Shades, three plays for BBC Two’s Lively Arts series, and in 1979 he won the television rights to Beckett’s Happy Days, screening it less than a fortnight after a famous revival at the Royal Court. Both stage and television productions starred Billie Whitelaw, who wrote in her autobiography that of all the directors she had ever worked with she remembered Powell “with particular affection”, considering him “terribly under-rated”.

Living Together (1975), was a dramatised documentary on the life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (played by Celia Johnson); Landscape from a Dream (1978) traced the development of the visionary landscape artist Paul Nash; A Haunted Man (1978), written by Denis Constanduros, was a beautiful evocation of the marriage of Thomas and Emma Hardy, also starring Billie Whitelaw; Women in Captivity (1979) told the story of female prisoners of war in the Far East. And there were profiles of LS Lowry, Jean Rhys, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Louis Malle, Karen Blixen in Africa, the travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1981 Powell made a perceptive profile of Salman Rushdie for Arena before the writer won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children. Later he went on to work with Rushdie on a television adaptation of the novel, which foundered for political reasons when India and then Sri Lanka refused to allow filming, after everything else, including screenplay and casting, was in place.

Powell’s We Think the World of You (1981), a drama about the writer and literary editor J R Ackerley for Omnibus, won a Bafta award, while No Country for Old Men (1981), David Nokes’s drama based on the “exile” of Jonathan Swift, starring Trevor Howard, won a Design and Directors Award.

Powell needed the patience of a saint when collaborating with Philip Roth on a 1984 television film of his novel The Ghost Writer, starring Claire Bloom, Roth’s companion at the time. In 2021, in an article for The Oldie, Powell recalled a writer with a split personality: “Philip 1” was “sane, enthusiastic, generous, erudite, good”, while “Philip 2, the subversive, hilarious voice in Portnoy’s Complaint” was “filled with paranoid rage and self-obsession”.

They worked together on a new script after Roth insisted the first scriptwriter be fired, and Roth seemed delighted with it. The end result, also starring Sam Wanamaker, was described by one critic as “unmatched in the annals of movie-making for its visual take on the creative process”. But Powell soon got a letter from “Philip 2” complaining about the casting of Wanamaker, for which he blamed Powell, even though he had been fully involved in the casting process.

Powell continued to work until shortly before his death. His other television productions for the BBC included an adaptation by Andrew Davies of The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis’s Booker Prize-winning novel (1992); and he devised and directed Tears Before Bedtime (1995), a four-episode series based around the lives of live-in nannies working for middle-class professional couples. For ITV in 2005 he directed Falling, based on a 1999 novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, adapted by Andrew Davies and starring Michael Kitchen and Penelope Wilton.

His radio work included adapting and directing (with “menacing precision” according to the Spectator) a two-part radio dramatisation of The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen’s novel set in wartime London, based on a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Anna Chancellor (Radio 4, 2011), and an adaptation of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Radio 4, 2019).

He diversified into theatre, directing, in 2009, a tense, sensitive revival of John Wilson’s For King and Country, which dramatised the consequences of a young country boy soldier (played by Adam Gillen) who walks away from the battle at Ypres in 1917 suffering from shell shock.

The play, first staged in 1964, and made into an award-winning film by Joseph Losey, interested Powell not only because of its relevance at a time when British soldiers were returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD, but also because, as well as evoking sympathy for an inarticulate, troubled young man, it dealt fairly with Army officers tasked with enforcing  the Draconian military discipline without which troops could never be brought to endure the horrors of war.

In the last years of his life Powell produced short plays and platform performances, staged at Kings Place, north London, for Jewish Book Week.

Powell had a lifelong interest in photography, co-founding Album, a magazine dedicated to early photography, and editing two books about the 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

In the last months of his life, despite being confined to a wheelchair with leukaemia and cancer of the spine, Powell remained sociable and cheerful, even setting up his own lunch club two months before he died, to which he invited old friends, such as Penelope Wilton, and family members.

His response to the difficulties of his illness was to quote the French film director Claude Chabrol: “You have to accept the fact that sometimes you’re the pigeon and sometimes you’re the statue.”

In 1968 he married the artist Virginia Lucas, with whom he had a son, Archie, a documentary film-maker, and a daughter, Georgia, now the Duchess of Beaufort. They survive him with four grandchildren.

Tristram Powell, born April 25 1940, died March 1 2024