The Ottawa Citizen (21/Feb/1990) - Red Shoes director dies at 84
Details
- article: Red Shoes director dies at 84
- newspaper: The Ottawa Citizen (21/Feb/1990)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, New York City, New York
Article
Red Shoes director dies at 84
British film director Michael Powell, whose films included such classics as The Red Shoes and The Battle of the River Plate, died on Monday night after a short illness. He was 84.
He fell ill two weeks ago in New York and was flown back to his Gloucestershire home, where he died, the National Film Archive said.
In a career that spanned 60 years, he produced a string of box office hits including The Black Narcissus (1947), Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
His most outstanding critical success was with A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a wartime drama about a fighter pilot starring David Niven.
Together with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, who died two years ago, he formed one of the most innovative partnerships in British cinema, making nearly 20 feature films between 1939 and 1951.
Powell's career began in silent films after he read the first edition of The Picturegoer magazine.
"It was like meeting St. Francis," he said. "From then on I was lost, gone. It had to be the films."
He was fired from his first film job for dropping priceless photographic plates but worked his way back into favor and became a stills photographer for Alfred Hitchcock.
He was never afraid of controversy. Winston Churchill tried to ban Blimp because he felt it was not positive enough and succeeded in keeping it from the United States until after the war.
It made its premiere in full in New York only last year when U.S. critics acclaimed it as "the English Citizen Kane."
He was sometimes accused of poor taste. His 1960 thriller Peeping Tom was about a film studio employee with a fetish for photographing the fear in women's eyes as he murdered them. It was banned in Britain, although it became a cult success on the Continent.
