Biography

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.
- IMDb mini biography by: frankfob2@yahoo.com

"The Pink Panther" series of comedies has made its mark in film history as one of the most popular series ever made. In 1980 "Romance of the Pink Panther" was written by Peter Sellers and Jim Moloney. At the time director Blake Edwards and Sellers didn't want to work together, so Donner was brought in. Unfortunately Sellers, who starred in Donner's What's New Pussycat (1965), died before production started.

Used his clout to talk English stage stars Vivian Pickles and Jan Waters into acting in a slum pub-theatre production of Robert Patrick's play "Kennedy's Children" for five pounds a week.

Cousin and close friend of journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin, and used him as an actor in his Nothing But the Best (1964).

Donated his papers to BFI Special Collections

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 282-285. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

This is true of all farce - you can make a man lose his trousers, but you can't make him lose his jockstrap. A modest metaphor.