From Roger
An obituary for David Greene, director of the Michael Powell
production 'Sebastian' /Mr. Sebastian (US) (1968)
The Independent
11 April 2003
David Brian Green (David Greene), film director, producer and writer:
born Manchester 22 February 1921; twice married (three sons, one
daughter); died Ojai, California 7 April 2003.
The director and occasional writer and producer David Greene made
some inventive and unusual films, including the spy thriller
Sebastian, but found his greatest success as a television director,
winning the Emmy Award four times for his work on such landmark shows
as Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man.
He was also brave enough to make television versions of several
classic movies, including The Night of the Hunter (1991) and Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane? (1991), the latter starring the sisters Lynn
and Vanessa Redgrave. Working into his seventies, he directed Lynda
La Plante's melodramatic mob saga for television Bella Mafia (1997),
which starred Vanessa Redgrave and Nastassia Kinski.
Born David Brian Green in Manchester in 1921 (he added the extra "e"
later), he began his career as an actor, working in repertory at the
Old Vic and appearing in the films The Small Voice (1948), Daughter
of Darkness (1948), The Golden Madonna (1948) and The Wooden Horse
(1950). At the Old Vic he acted with Laurence Olivier and Vivien
Leigh, and in 1951 went on an American tour with Olivier's production
of Antony and Cleopatra.
The following year he moved to Canada, where in four years he became
one of the country's leading television directors. He moved to the
United States in 1956 to direct television drama, then commuted
between the US and the UK as a freelance director for television,
movies and the stage.
Green's first feature film was The Shuttered Room (1967), starring
Gig Young and Carol Lynley and shot in Cornwall (effectively
substituting for New England). It was a standard tale of a locked
room at the top of an old house, but Greene was praised for his moody
and atmospheric direction and for the performances of his cast,
including a broodlingly malevolent Oliver Reed and a chillingly
eccentric Flora Robson.
His next film, Sebastian (1968), also won him personal plaudits for
his handling of an offbeat comedy thriller in which Dirk Bogarde
played a mathematics expert who is employed by the British government
to decipher enemy codes. With Susannah York as Bogarde's girlfriend
and John Gielgud stealing every scene he was in as Bogarde's boss, it
was a genial piece that, like many of Greene's feature films, just
lacked the spark to make it truly memorable.
The Strange Affair (1968) was a competent thriller notable for
showcasing Susan George in an early role as the pawn of a
p*rnographic ring, and Greene followed this with a film he also co-
produced, I Start Counting (1969). A forerunner of the serial-killer
thrillers that were to proliferate a decade later, it starred Jenny
Agutter as a teenager with a crush on the chief suspect, her
stepbrother.
In 1969 Greene won his first Emmy, for his direction of J.P. Miller's
play The People Next Door, produced for CBS Television Playhouse. A
less effective film version in 1970 starred Julie Harris and Eli
Wallach as a suburban couple who discover their daughter is taking
LSD and that she is being supplied drugs by the seemingly innocent
son of the high school's head teacher.
Greene made only three more films for the cinema, the simplistic
musical depicting Jesus as a New York hippie, Godspell (1973), a dull
adventure yarn of a trapped submarine, Gray Lady Down (1978) starring
Charlton Heston, and a good rural drama, Hard Country (1981). The
last, starring Jan-Michael Vincent and Kim Basinger as factory
workers in a small Texan town, was unfortunately overshadowed by the
inferior Urban Cowboy (1980) which starred John Travolta and Debra
Winger in similar roles.
David Greene's prolific work for television included the enjoyably
outlandish movie Madame Sin (1971). Starring Bette Davis as an evil
genius plotting to take over a Polaris submarine, it was released
theatrically in the UK. Greene won his second Emmy for his work on
the 12-hour mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) – he directed
episodes 1, 2, 7 and 8.
In 1977 he directed the first episode of Roots, a history-making
series that gained the largest audience for the time of any dramatic
show in television history – approximately 100 million viewers
watched the last of the eight consecutive nights on which it was
scheduled. Greene later said that when he read the script, adapted
from Alex Haley's book about his family's history as slaves, "I
couldn't stop crying". On the 20th anniversary of the series, he
recalled, "I was very overwhelmed being asked to do it."
He won a fourth Emmy for Friendly Fire (1979), an exceptionally
moving story of a couple (Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty) who meet lies
and evasion when they try to find out how their son was killed in
Vietnam, ultimately discovering that he was accidentally killed by
his colleagues. Greene was nominated for another Emmy for the mini-
series Fatal Vision (1984), telling the true story of a Green Beret
captain, Dr Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused of killing his
pregnant wife and two daughters at an army camp in 1970.
The director's last television film was the mystery thriller The Girl
Next Door (1998).
Tom Vallance
