Clive Donner(1926-2010)
- Director
- Editor
- Editorial Department
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
The Secret Place (1957). In the
1960s he went from smaller, harder-edged black-and-white films to more
commercial, "now" films, such as
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968),
What's New Pussycat (1965)
and the disastrous flop
Alfred the Great (1969). He
worked only sporadically in features after that--two more bombs,
The Nude Bomb (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
Rogue Male (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
Arthur the King (1985),
a bizarre, convoluted and disjointed mess about which the less said,
the better.
