When Michael Blakemore collected his second Tony Award on the same evening in June 2000 – becoming the only person in history to win Best Director of both a play and a musical in a single ceremony – his acceptance speech was characteristically dry. “All I can say is, thank you America,” he told the Radio City audience. “And when I say America, of course I mean New York. And when I mean New York, I mean Broadway.” The joke landed as a polite deflection. It was also, as Blakemore understood better than almost anyone, a precise diagnosis of the theatre world’s hierarchies and blind spots. He had spent fifty years navigating those structures, from the repertory stages of northern England to the South Bank’s concrete corridors, and he had emerged with a body of work that defied easy categorisation. He was an Australian who became inseparable from the British institution; a former actor who understood performers with an intimacy that few directors could match; a literary mind who wrote three books about the profession, the last of which anatomised the National Theatre’s founding years with the forensic candour of a insider who had nothing left to lose.
Michael Howell Blakemore was born on 18 June 1928 in Sydney, the son of Conrad Howell Blakemore, an eye surgeon, and Una Mary Litchfield. His parents divorced when he was nine. He was educated at The King’s School in Parramatta, where, at the age of sixteen, he decided to become a film director after watching Laurence Olivier’s 1944 screen version of Henry V. He enrolled at the University of Sydney to study medicine but failed his third-year examinations and left. The fork in the road came when he interviewed the actor Robert Morley for the university paper. Morley, touring Australia in his own play Edward, My Son, was impressed enough to offer Blakemore a job as his publicist at six pounds a week, and on learning of his theatrical ambitions, wrote a recommendation letter to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Blakemore subsidised his ocean passage to London by working as a steward on the ship. He arrived in 1950 and trained at RADA until 1952, alongside contemporaries including Joan Collins, Diane Cilento, and Rosemary Harris.
His first professional stage appearance came in 1952 at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, as the doctor in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. What followed was several years of repertory theatre in Huddersfield, Derby, Hythe, Chesterfield, and the Birmingham Rep, followed by seasons at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, and a stint at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre. In 1959, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company’s season at Stratford-upon-Avon, where the company included Charles Laughton, Olivier, Edith Evans, and Paul Robeson, directed by Peter Hall. Both Hall and Blakemore harboured romantic interests in Vanessa Redgrave; neither succeeded. Hall went on to found the RSC. Blakemore returned to the regions. The rivalry between them would resurface, with bitter consequences, a decade later.
The turning point came in Glasgow in 1967, when the script of Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg landed on Blakemore’s desk. Every major theatre in Britain had turned down this blackly funny vaudeville about a couple raising a disabled child. Blakemore, then co-artistic director of the Glasgow Citizens, staged it. The production caused a sensation. It transferred to London, won the Evening Standard Best Play award, and proceeded to Broadway, earning Blakemore his first Tony nomination for directing. As the critic Michael Coveney wrote in The Guardian, “His name was made.” Nichols became one of Blakemore’s most important collaborators. Their partnership produced The National Health (1969), a corrosive comedy about an underfunded NHS staged at the National Theatre; Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), an autobiographical memory play; and Privates on Parade (1977), a musical comedy about an army entertainment unit in Malaya during the Emergency, originally produced by the RSC with Denis Quilley as the flamboyant Captain Terri Dennis.
Blakemore joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1969, invited by Laurence Olivier to direct Nichols’s The National Health. In 1970, as the company prepared for its much-delayed relocation to the South Bank, Olivier invited Blakemore to become one of two Associate Directors. The other was John Dexter. It was, as Blakemore later acknowledged, a position shadowed by the question of succession. Olivier was already suffering from the medical crises that would define his final years. According to Philip Ziegler’s biography, Blakemore was “highly favoured” as a potential successor. In 1973, the Board of the National Theatre appointed Peter Hall without consulting Olivier. Blakemore was incandescent. He presented a formal manifesto to the planning committee recommending reforms – among them, that Hall should not continue to draw a full salary from the National during his frequent absences directing at Glyndebourne and Bayreuth. The committee refused to discuss the manifesto. Blakemore’s salary was stopped without warning or explanation. He resigned.
The affair left a wound that never fully healed. Blakemore’s third book, Stage Blood (2013), anatomised the National Theatre’s founding years with devastating precision. In it, he described the aftermath of Hall’s appointment: “It was a little like a putsch, and people were separated from one another by private concerns: what did the future hold and would they still keep their jobs?” The book also contained a remarkable 30-page account of his work with Olivier on Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1971, in which he coaxed the ageing actor into one of his greatest performances while the institution lurched from crisis to crisis. Stage Blood won the Sheridan Morley Prize for theatrical biography – a fitting irony, given that the prize was named after the son of Robert Morley, the man who had, decades earlier, pointed Blakemore towards RADA.
After leaving the National, Blakemore joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to direct Privates on Parade, then became resident director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in 1980. It was there that the second great creative partnership of his career began, with the playwright Michael Frayn. He directed Frayn’s Make and Break (1980), starring Leonard Rossiter and Prunella Scales, and then, in February 1982, the world premiere of Noises Off before its transfer to the Savoy Theatre. The play – a backstage farce about a touring production of a fictional play called Nothing On – required not just comic timing but engineering thinking. Its complex stage mechanics, with doors opening and closing in precisely choreographed sequences across a split-level set, demanded a director who could organise chaos with mathematical precision. Blakemore’s production established Noises Off as the finest modern farce in the English language. The play has been revived repeatedly since, but his original staging set the template.
The Frayn association continued with Benefactors (Vaudeville, 1984), Frayn’s translation of Uncle Vanya (Vaudeville, 1988), Here (Donmar Warehouse, 1993), and Now You Know (Hampstead, 1995). Then, in May 1998, Blakemore returned to the National Theatre – where Richard Eyre had by then succeeded Hall – to direct Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about a historic meeting between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr. The play defied all expectations of commercial viability: it was a two-hour debate about quantum mechanics and moral responsibility, set in the afterlife. Blakemore’s production made it a popular hit. It transferred to the Duchess Theatre in 1999 and ran for years.
The year 2000 brought the double Tony triumph. Blakemore won Best Director of a Play for Copenhagen and Best Director of a Musical for the Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter’s adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. No individual had won both awards in the same ceremony before or since. The achievement reflected the extraordinary range of his craft: the intellectual rigour required to stage Frayn’s philosophical drama and the choreographic instinct needed to mount a large-scale musical, often in the same working week. He also received Drama Desk Awards for both productions that year.
Blakemore’s later career maintained the same standard. He directed David Hare’s Knuckle (1974), Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1987) – with Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack both winning Tony Awards on Broadway – and the musical City of Angels (1989), Larry Gelbart and Cy Coleman’s noir pastiche. At the National, he staged Frayn’s Democracy (2003), a portrait of Willy Brandt with Roger Allam, and Afterlife (2008). On Broadway, he directed Angela Lansbury in Terrence McNally’s Deuce (2007) and the world premiere of Mark Twain’s previously unproduced Is He Dead? (2007). His 2009 New York revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, again with Lansbury as Madame Arcati, transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London in 2014. His final major production was the London premiere of The Life at the Southwark Playhouse in 2017, starring Sharon D. Clarke.
Blakemore was also a novelist and essayist. His first book, Next Season (1969), drawn from his years in repertory theatre, was praised by Simon Callow as the book that “no book has so truly depicted the creative, anarchic excitement of acting.” Arguments with England (2004) and Stage Blood completed a trilogy that constitutes one of the most candid accounts of British theatre-making in the twentieth century. In 2003, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia and Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 2010, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Michael Blakemore died on 10 December 2023, following a short illness. He was 95. He is survived by his wife, the theatrical designer Tanya McCallin, and by three children: Beatrice, Clementine, and Conrad. His legacy resides not in a single signature production but in the breadth of his achievement – a body of work that ranged from Chekhov to Cole Porter, from Nichols’s savage comedies about the NHS to Frayn’s meditation on the ethics of atomic physics, unified by an insistence that theatre is a collaborative art in which the director’s task is to realise the potential of the actor and, through them, the audience. That conviction, learned from Tyrone Guthrie at the Bristol Old Vic in the early 1960s and practised without compromise for half a century, is the measure of the man.
