Silvion Oscar Lewenstein was a British theatre and film producer, who helped create some of the leading British theatre and film productions of the 1950s and 1960s.
15 Facts About Oscar Lewenstein
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Oscar Lewenstein spent most of his childhood in Hove, Sussex.
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Oscar Lewenstein co-founded the English Stage Company in 1954 with director George Devine and dramatist Ronald Duncan.
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Oscar Lewenstein was responsible for three of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop productions, including Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey transferring to the West End at around the same time, to the detriment of Littlewood's company.
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In 1969, Oscar Lewenstein opened The Roundhouse in Camden Town as a theatrical venue for the experimental American collective The Living Theatre.
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Oscar Lewenstein was the producer of, among other films, The Knack.
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Oscar Lewenstein optioned Joe Orton's screenplay Up Against It after Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles, had rejected it as a project for his clients, but the film was never made.
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The theatre and film director Lindsay Anderson, who thought Oscar Lewenstein was "the strangest mixture of foolishness and good intuitions" worked with him on The White Bus, a short film based on one of Shelagh Delaney's short stories.
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In 1970, after Neville Blond died, Oscar Lewenstein became chairman of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre jointly with Robin Fox, and then sole chairman in 1971 after Fox died.
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Oscar Lewenstein was artistic director of the English Stage Company from 1972 to 1975, after two years as chairman.
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In October 1974, Oscar Lewenstein instigated a letter to The Times, signed by 13 other theatre directors, over a perception that the funding of the new National Theatre building would starve the rest of subsided theatre in Britain.
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Oscar Lewenstein much admired Orton's plays, and while Oscar Lewenstein was artistic director of the Royal Court he organised a season of the dramatist's work, which included a successful revival of What the Butler Saw in a production by Lindsay Anderson.
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Oscar Lewenstein married the potter Eileen Edith Lewenstein in 1952, his second wife; the couple had two sons.
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Oscar Lewenstein's memoir Kicking Against the Pricks: A Theatre Producer Looks Back was published in 1994 by Nick Hern Books.
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Oscar Lewenstein died of heart failure, aged 80, at his home in Hove, Sussex.