Rudolph Cartier (17 April 1904 – 7 June 1994) was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC. He is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. He died in a car accident in 1994, aged 89.
About Rudolph Cartier in brief
Rudolph Cartier (17 April 1904 – 7 June 1994) was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC. He 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. After studying architecture and then drama, Cartier began his career as a screenwriters and then film director in Berlin, working for UFA Studios. After a brief spell in the United States he moved to the United Kingdom in 1935. He went on to produce and direct over 120 productions in the next 24 years, ending his television career with the play Loyalties in 1976. 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. The British Film Institute’s website describes him as “a true pioneer of television”, while the critic Peter Black once wrote that: “Nobody was within a mile of Rudolph Cartier in the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and as deep as CinemaScope.”. In a 1990 interview about his career, he told BBC Two’s The Late Show that the BBC drama department had needed him like water in the desert, and that he shared many of the need to improve many of its programmes. He was an important presence in the creation of the Heart of Arrow, the BBC’s adaptation of Albrecht Albrechts’ novel Unruhige Nacht Goes’ (1952), which was initially adapted by Cartier from Albrehcht’s novel Albreche Nacht (1954) Cartier’s first BBC television production was a play entitled Arrow to the Heart, transmitted on the evening of 20 July 1952.
He died in a car accident in 1994, aged 89, and was buried in a private ceremony at the University of Wurzburg in Austria. He had previously worked as an architect, before changing career paths and enrolling to study drama at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He also worked as a film producer, overseeing a 1951 short film adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip. In 1952, Michael Barry, with whom Cartier had worked on an aborted project in 1948, became the new Head of Drama at BBC Television and interviewed Cartier for a post as a staff television producer in the drama department, a job which also involved directing. At his interview he told Barry that he thought his department’s output was ‘dreadful’ and that television drama needed ‘new scripts and a new approach’ Cartier returned for a time to the U.S. where he studied production methods in the new medium of television. He worked with noted writers, directors and producers including Ewald André Dupont and Erich Pommer. In 1933 he became a film director, overseeing the thriller Invisible Opponent for producer Sam Spiegel.
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