Anthony Harvey (3 June 1930 – 23 November 2017)[1] was an English filmmaker who began his career as a teenage actor,[2] was a film editor in the 1950s, and moved into directing in the mid-1960s.
Harvey gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but, although he worked for a time in repertory theatre, realised that he was not likely to be successful as an actor and decided to move into film-making.
Harvey's first film as editor was the Anthony Asquith short On Such A Night (1956), followed by his first feature assignment, the Ealing war comedy Private's Progress (also 1956), starring Richard Attenborough and Terry-Thomas.
Harvey edited the industrial drama The Angry Silence (1960), directed by Guy Green, and the Anthony Asquith comedy The Millionairess (also 1960), which starred Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren.
Harvey's first feature film as a director was a monochrome short subject, the intense one-hour race relations drama Dutchman (1966), which depicts a fateful encounter between a black man and a white woman on the New York subway.
[citation needed] Harvey gained the respect and consent of the film's other star, Katharine Hepburn, leading to her third Oscar and a lifelong friendship.
[5] Harvey's third directorial project was the ill-fated uncompleted film A Glimpse of Tiger (1970), an oddball romantic comedy about a pair of bohemian con-artists living in New York City.
[5] Harvey reunited with Hepburn for the acclaimed made-for-TV adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1973) which also featured Sam Waterston and Michael Moriarty.
The film is also notable for appearances (as themselves) by a number of real-life tennis stars of the period including Pancho Gonzalez, Guillermo Vilas, John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase.
The following year Harvey reunited with Liv Ullmann for the romantic drama Richard's Things (which also featured British actress Amanda Redman) and in 1981 he directed the American sequences of The Patricia Neal Story, a tele-movie starring Glenda Jackson which detailed the real-life struggles faced by Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, who at the height of her career had a devastating stroke which left her unable to speak, and the efforts of her then-husband Roald Dahl (played by Dirk Bogarde) and their friends and family to help her recover.
Harvey directed another American tele-movie, Svengali (1983) which was based on the 1894 George du Maurier novel Trilby; it starred Peter O'Toole as an ageing singer who discovers and nurtures a new talent (Jodie Foster) with whom he becomes romantically involved but whom he seeks to completely control.
The story concerns an elderly New York woman who witnesses a murder committed by a top hit-man (Nick Nolte), whom she then blackmails into killing some of her friends.