Peter Collinson(1936-1980)

After national service in Malaya, he briefly had a one-man variety act before going into commercial television as a trainee director with ATV. He was subsequently with Ulster Television in Northern Ireland as senior drama director. After that, he had mixed success with several low-budget feature films. His one major success was the popular action caper The Italian Job (1969). Thereafter, his career declined to poorly-scripted international co-productions and inferior re-makes of classics, such as Ten Little Indians (1974) and The Spiral Staircase (1975).