Christopher Morahan


Christopher Thomas Morahan CBE was a British stage and television director and production executive.

Biography

Early life and career

Morahan was born on 9 July 1929 in London, the son of film production designer Tom Morahan and his wife, Nancy Charlotte Barker, an artist.
He was educated at Highgate School followed by his national service. Originally thinking about a career as an architect, he realised it would be some years before he could earn a living and thus settled on working in the film industry. The director Thorold Dickinson advised him to learn about acting and the theatrical repertoire instead. He trained for the stage at the Old Vic Theatre School from 1947 with actor/director Michel Saint-Denis, designer Margaret Harris, and director George Devine.
Initially an actor, he briefly worked as a stage manager on Orson Welles' touring production of Othello, but refused to work on Welles' next production and found the theatre of the time unenthusing. In a career change of sorts, he joined ATV as a floor manager and, subsequently became a television director from 1957, on Emergency Ward 10, a new ITV series.

At the BBC and in the theatre

Later, he developed a rapport with writer John Hopkins while working together on Z-Cars. This led to Morahan directing Hopkins' Fable, a Wednesday Play parable locating a reversed South African apartheid in Britain, and the BBC's version of Talking to a Stranger. Morahan gained "brilliant performances from all his cast" wrote Michael Billington of Talking to a Stranger, Michael Bryant, Maurice Denham and Margery Mason being three of the four leads, "but it was Judi Dench as the daughter, forced to reveal her pregnancy to her tight-lipped parents, who astonished everyone. Morahan's first stage production was Jules Feiffer's Little Murders for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in July 1967, starring Brenda Bruce, Barbara Jefford, Derek Godfrey and Roland Curram.
From 1972 to 1976, he was the Head of Plays for BBC Television, a department responsible for such series as Play for Today and Play of the Month. In this role he commissioned Days of Hope, a four-part serial written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach which covers proletarian life from 1916 to 1926. He managed to appoint Roy Battersby as the director of Colin Welland's Leeds United despite negative vetting from MI5 which rejected Battersby because of his membership of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. While working for the BBC, Peter Nichols was another dramatist with whom Morahan had a successful partnership, but another project with John Hopkins, the six-part play cycle Fathers and Families, was a major disappointment.

Later career

Morahan joined the National Theatre in 1977 as Deputy Director and was appointed Co-Director of the Olivier Theatre.
He was involved in creating the 14-part television drama The Jewel in the Crown, of which he was co-director and producer. The series won a Primetime Emmy Award and a BAFTA TV Award in 1985. The film Clockwise, with John Cleese in the lead, was a minor hit.

Personal life and honours

Morahan's first wife was Joan Lucie Murray, with whom he had two sons, including director Andy Morahan; a daughter from the marriage predeceased him. After his first wife died, Morahan married actress Anna Carteret; the couple have two daughters: theatre director Rebecca, also involved in human rights activism, and actress Hattie Morahan.
Morahan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
Morahan died on 7 April 2017, the same day as Tim Pigott-Smith, one of the leads in The Jewel in the Crown.

Selected directing credits

Television