Biography

Throughout his career, Cartier refused to work for commercial television: "I hate the idea of my creative work being constantly interrupted for commercial reasons, " he once commented. "I am an artist, not a salesman".

He is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In 1952, Michael Barry, with whom Cartier had worked on an aborted project in 1948, became the new Head of Drama at BBC Television and interviewed Cartier for a post as a staff television producer in the drama department, a job which also involved directing. At his interview, Cartier told Barry that he thought his department's output was "dreadful", and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach". In a 1990 interview about his career, he told BBC Two's The Late Show that the BBC drama department had "needed me like water in the desert". Barry shared many of Cartier's views on the need to improve television drama, and he hired him for the producer's job.

The British Film Institute's "Screenonline" website describes him as "a true pioneer of television", while the critic Peter Black once wrote that: "Nobody was within a mile of Rudolph Cartier in the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and as deep as CinemaScope".

Cartier became involved in the film industry in 1929, when he successfully submitted a script to a company based in Berlin, Germany. He then became a staff scriptwriter for UFA Studios, the primary German film company of the era, for which he worked on crime films and thrillers.