31 Facts About Rudolph Cartier

Rudolph Cartier is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Rudolph Cartier soon became one of the public service broadcaster's leading directors and went on to produce and direct over 120 productions in the next 24 years, ending his television career with the play Loyalties in 1976.

Active in both dramatic programming and opera, Rudolph Cartier won the equivalent of a BAFTA in 1957 for his work in the former, and one of his operatic productions was given an award at the 1962 Salzburg Festival.

Rudolph Cartier became involved in the film industry in 1929, when he successfully submitted a script to a company based in Berlin, Germany.

Rudolph Cartier then became a staff scriptwriter for UFA Studios, the primary German film company of the era, for which he worked on crime films and thrillers.

However, unlike Wilder, Rudolph Cartier did not find success in America, and in 1935 he moved again, to the United Kingdom.

In 1939, Rudolph Cartier first worked for BBC Television when his script Rehearsal for a Drama was produced by the service.

Rudolph Cartier had worked on another play for the service, The Dead Eye, but due to the outbreak of the Second World War this was stopped at the production stage.

Rudolph Cartier worked as a film producer, overseeing a 1951 short film adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip.

Rudolph Cartier returned for a time to the United States, where he studied production methods in the new medium of television.

In 1952, Michael Barry, with whom Rudolph Cartier had worked on an aborted project in 1948, became the new Head of Drama at BBC Television and interviewed Rudolph Cartier for a post as a staff television producer in the drama department, a job which involved directing.

At his interview, Rudolph Cartier told Barry that he thought his department's output was "dreadful", and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach".

Rudolph Cartier's first BBC television production was a play entitled Arrow to the Heart, transmitted on the evening of 20 July 1952.

The success of The Quatermass Experiment led to two sequels, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit, both produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier and written by Kneale.

Rudolph Cartier appeared live on television himself to defend the production in a studio debate, and eventually the Board of Governors of the BBC voted that the second performance should go ahead as planned.

Rudolph Cartier often spent large amounts of money on his productions.

Rudolph Cartier made a brief return to filmmaking in 1958 when he directed the feature Passionate Summer, but he saw himself primarily as a television director, and it remained his favourite medium.

Rudolph Cartier directed several operas for the BBC, a genre for which he had a great passion.

Rudolph Cartier oversaw adaptations of established operas such as Salome and Carmen as well as original productions written especially for television.

Rudolph Cartier continued to direct television dramas during the 1960s, although after Barry stepped down as Head of Drama in 1961, he lost much of his creative independence.

Rudolph Cartier found himself assigned to direct episodes of regular drama series, as such as Maigret and Z-Cars.

Rudolph Cartier was still able to direct several notable productions during the decade, including a number which explored the Nazi era in Germany from which he had escaped in 1933.

Rudolph Cartier began, for the first time, to direct pieces which dealt with the Holocaust, such as Doctor Korczak and the Children, concerning the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, and The Joel Brand Story.

Rudolph Cartier was married three times, lastly to Margaret Pepper from 1949 until his death.

Rudolph Cartier had one daughter, Corinne, with Pepper, and another from a previous marriage.

Rudolph Cartier died on 7 June 1994, at the age of 90; his death was overshadowed in the media by that of Dennis Potter, another important figure in the history of British television drama, who died on the same day.

Nigel Kneale, scriptwriter of both of the Rudolph Cartier dramas acclaimed by the BFI, felt that the productions would not have been as successful as they were had they been handled by any other director.

Rudolph Cartier is rightly recognised as a major influence on the visual development of British television drama.

Rudolph Cartier's pioneering use of an increased number of pre-filmed sequences to open out the studio-bound, live television drama productions of the 1950s is praised by Lez Cooke.

Not all of Rudolph Cartier's work was so well regarded; in particular, his cinematic efforts have not achieved the level of praise of his television work.

In 1990, the BBC Two arts magazine programme The Late Show produced an edition which featured a retrospective of Rudolph Cartier's work, including a new interview with the director discussing his career.