Piers Haggard was the great-great-nephew of the writer Sir Henry Rider Haggard.
17 Facts About Piers Haggard
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At the age of one, Piers Haggard was evacuated with his mother and older brother Paul to New York where his paternal grandfather Godfrey Piers Haggard was the British consul-general.
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Piers Haggard's father was a captain in the British Intelligence Corps.
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In 1946, Piers Haggard's mother remarried and the family moved to Muckhart Mill Farm in Clackmannanshire, Scotland.
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Piers Haggard attended school at Dollar Academy, and between 1956 and 1960 studied English at Edinburgh University.
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Piers Haggard began his career as an assistant director at the Royal Court in 1960.
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Piers Haggard joined the first National Theatre company in 1963, where he co-directed with John Dexter and Bill Gaskill and assisted Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli.
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Piers Haggard directed for a variety of programmes throughout the 1970s, such as The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Churchill's People, The Love School, Love for Lydia and Play of the Month: The Chester Mystery Plays.
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In 1978, Piers Haggard was hired by producer Kenith Trodd to direct Dennis Potter's BBC drama serial Pennies from Heaven, which received a BAFTA.
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In 1966, Piers Haggard began his film career working as an interpreter for Michelangelo Antonioni on the British-Italian film Blowup.
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Piers Haggard directed the cinema version of Quatermass ; Summer Story ; The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu, Peter Sellers' last film; and Venom.
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Piers Haggard directed Academy Award winners Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell in the 2006 mini-series The Shell Seekers.
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Piers Haggard was president of The Association of Directors and Producers in 1976; he founded and was first chairman of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, formed in 1982 at a meeting of over a hundred film, theatre, and television directors at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London.
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Piers Haggard started the Directors' and Producers' Rights Society, serving on its board for 20 years, until it transmuted in 2007 into Directors UK, where he served on the board until 2017.
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Piers Haggard was vice president and chairman of FERA, the Association of European film directors, from 2010 to 2013.
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Piers Haggard had four children by his first marriage, to Christiane Stokes: Sarah, Claire, Rachel and Philip.
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Piers Haggard was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to film, television and theatre.