Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan Bt

Producer of 'Brief Encounter' and 'In Which We Serve'

Anthony James Allan Havelock-Allan, film producer: born Darlington, Co.Durham, 28 February 1904; Chairman, British Film Academy 1952; Chairman of Council, Society of Film and Television Arts 1962, 1963; succeeded 1975 as fourth Bt; married 1939 Valerie Hobson (died 1998; one son, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1952), 1979 Sara Ruiz de Villafranca; died London 11 January 2003.

The film producer in fiction, and all too often in life, is characterised as philistine and crook – usually both. A lovable producer would be a contradiction in terms. However, that is the only fitting description for the extraordinary Anthony Havelock-Allan. He was tall and distinguished, very intelligent and amusing. He had such command of language and such enthusiasm that his answer to a simple question could be memorable. He was an aristocrat, he lived to a great age, had one of the proudest names in British cinema and he remained – despite increasing deafness – approachable, incredibly knowledgeable and lovable.

He was born in 1904 at Blackwell Manor, near Darlington, into a family of Liberal MPs and military men. His great-grandfather General Sir Henry Havelock occupies one of the controversial plinths in Trafalgar Square. In the 19th century four brothers distinguished themselves in military service – one, William, a hero of the Peninsular War, was at Waterloo. His grandfather Lt-Gen Sir Henry Havelock, who won the VC in India, added the Allan in 1878 on inheriting the family's estates.

Anthony Havelock-Allan was also destined for the Army, but he fell in love with the theatre from his first trip to a pantomime in Newcastle at the age of five. When musical comedies became popular, he remembered being taken to see Gertie Millar in Our Miss Gibbs at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, and the thrill that came from the curtains opening and the dazzling flood of light. In 1911, the family came south and Anthony was sent to a famous day school in Sloane Street, Mr Gibbs', where Anthony Asquith, the future film director, and son of the Liberal prime minister, was a couple of years his senior.

After 18 months, he was sent to a prep school in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, North Hall School. The First World War broke out and he recalled the pupils being rushed in their pyjamas to the cellar during an air-raid, and then being allowed to watch the first Zeppelin shot down over Britain plunging in flames on nearby Cuffley. (The aviator, Lt Leefe Robinson, won the VC.) In 1917, he went to Charterhouse (which he hated), from where, it was assumed, he would enter the Army.

In the 1920s, Havelock-Allan played minor roles with the Windsor Strollers. But he did not consider the theatre as a career. His brother had entered the Scots Guards and, now that the war was over, was finding military life highly congenial, living in London, with a box at the opera, and running two racehorses. Nobody thought Anthony would pass the exam and, since one member of the family had to earn some money, all thoughts of the Army were abandoned. He got a job with Garrard's, the Crown Jewellers, and went to Chelsea Polytechnic to study gemmology. At dinner one evening, he described the work to the young lady seated next to him. "She telephoned the hostess afterwards and complained indignantly, 'Do you know, that young man is in trade!' "

He continued in trade as Artists' and Recording Manager for the Brunswick Gramophone Company in London – meeting Ravel and Stravinsky – and in the late Twenties went to Berlin ("a wonderful sort of Sin City") as managing director of Vox AG. He returned to London to work in the Stock Exchange, just as the country embarked on the biggest slump in its history. He got a job on the Evening Standard, where he created an entirely new form of classified advertising for estate agents which is now in general use. He sold beauty preparations and even worked at Ciro's night-club, booking their cabaret acts.

In 1933 he entered the film industry, thanks to his friend Richard Norton (later Lord Grantley). The American producer Joseph Schenck told Norton that he would give him a star, a story and an American director if he would make a picture to launch Jack Buchanan in America. Norton agreed, and invited Havelock-Allan to join the project as his assistant and as his casting director, adding, "I'm sure this is the right business for you – you'll love it."

He couldn't have started with a finer example of film-industry madness. Schenck had sold them a story he couldn't get anybody to make in America. It was a musical comedy set in the Great War and at one point during a story conference a writer described a scene in which Buchanan is behind the lines, dressed as a seal, juggling for the Germans. The American director sensibly picked up the phone and booked his passage home.

Norton decided to abandon that one and to make Brewster's Millions, an old standby. They needed an exceptionally strong-minded director capable of controlling Buchanan, so he and Havelock-Allan cast from photographs, choosing the man with the toughest face. He proved to be about as tough as Casper Milquetoast and Buchanan had the film made as he wanted it. It proved a most enjoyable job, however, since Havelock-Allan was required to find a group of young women to become the British equivalent of the Goldwyn Girls. During the production, he met a young film editor called David Lean who would have a profound effect on his career.

Havelock-Allan spent two years producing what were known as Quota Quickies. These often despised little pictures were churned out by American companies – in this case Paramount – to meet the new government quotas. They usually cost £6,000, ran to six reels and had to be made in six days. They gave British cinema an even worse reputation than it already had, but provided excellent training for directors such as Michael Powell and cameramen such as Ronald Neame. "Oh, I've never had greater fun in my life," said Havelock-Allan:

I worked with a lot of nice actors who went on to become famous – Rex Harrison, George Sanders, Margaret Rutherford . . . Quota Quickies were a wonderful nursery for actors. I made 23 of them in two years, made a profit with them, made one or two not bad ones that actually became second features, instead of being shown to the charwomen at 10 o'clock in the morning.

Havelock-Allan's name enters the history books when he joined Two Cities Films with the energetic Italian Filippo Del Giudice. He wanted a prestige production and despatched Havelock-Allan to convince Noël Coward. Alas, Coward felt uneasy about the cinema, and it was not until Lord Louis Mountbatten was nearly killed when his ship, the Kelly, was sunk off Crete, that he expressed any enthusiasm. Coward agreed to produce a picture about this incident, to star in it, to write it and to direct it. But he needed a trained technician to help him. David Lean was chosen. Havelock-Allan became associate producer, although he actually produced the film.

He also worked on the script, and one of his ideas caused an outcry.

I had been one of those who, from 1936, thought war inevitable. When, in January 1939, the Daily Express published the headline "No War This Year", I was outraged by it. Everybody I knew was, in a sense, pro-war and ready to go – war was inevitable, it had to be fought. And I remembered that and I thought, "What a good idea. Let that newspaper be in the bilge, with the bottles and muck being swept away as the keel of this ship takes the water to fight Hitler."

Noël Coward had so much confidence in "his little darlings" that he eventually left them to get on with the film. Havelock-Allan realised that Lean was an exceptional director: "He approached his craft as a Jesuit approaches his religion." In Which We Serve (1942) made the reputations of everyone involved in it. Almost every member of the cast became stars, and Havelock-Allan, Lean and the cameraman Ronald Neame formed Cineguild Productions. Cineguild would become one of the handful of British film companies that discerning audiences grew to respect.

When the company was asked by the Ministry of Information to produce a propaganda film, David Lean did not want to direct it, so Havelock-Allan directed From the the Four Corners (1941) himself. Later, Cineguild produced other propaganda films for use by the Allies in liberated French towns. These were directed by Lean and produced by Havelock-Allan, but neither had the slightest memory of them until faced with documentary evidence. They were far too busy with their Noël Coward adaptations, such as This Happy Breed (1944), voted the most popular British film of the year, and Blithe Spirit (1945), which delighted audiences but gravely disappointed its author. Undeterred, Coward gave them another chance with Brief Encounter (1945), an adaptation of a one-act play which was scripted by the Cineguild team, and which won them an Oscar.

This delicate and very middle-class story of unconsummated passion was previewed for a cinema full of sailors near Chatham dockyards and by the end the audience was nearly hysterical. Lean wanted to burn the negative, but, once it found the audience it was designed for, it became perhaps the best-loved British film of its time. Havelock-Allan said,

Curiously enough, we thought the only place it would be received well would be in France, because there was a 1937 French film called L'Orage directed by Marc Allegret which was not unlike ours. But the French distributors said, "Oh no, it is nothing. We don't want it at all." The film went to Cannes, where it won the Critics' Prize.

The name Marc Allegret stayed in Havelock-Allan's memory and after he had worked on the script of Great Expectations (1946) with Lean and Neame, and been executive producer on Oliver Twist (1948), he began setting up a film starring his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, Blanche Fury. He hired Allegret to direct it. "I thought I could make a film of The Wicked Lady type, but without the Barbara Cartland flavour. I did, but the public didn't like it enough."

Cineguild broke up in 1949 and Havelock-Allan formed Constellation Films, an independent production company financed by the Rank Organisation. Among the films he produced were Never Take No for an Answer (1951), the Paul Gallico story of a small boy so concerned about his sick donkey that he travels to Rome to consult the Pope. Again, he used a French director – Maurice Cloche, who had made the Oscar-winning Monsieur Vincent (1947). This enabled him to shoot in the Vatican – the first commercial film to do so.

Havelock-Allan formed a partnership with another brilliant director, Anthony Asquith, and produced Young Lovers (1954) with Odile Versois and Orders to Kill (1958) which featured the great silent actress Lillian Gish. In 1968, he produced Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

Anthony Havelock-Allan had married Valerie Hobson in 1939. The marriage ended in 1952. They remained friends, however, and Hobson always spoke of his "great elegance of mind". In 1979, he married Sara, the daughter of the Ambassador to Chile and to Brazil, and this marriage was a great success.

At the end of his career, Havelock-Allan was reunited with David Lean for Ryan's Daughter (1970), a film savaged by the critics but which has won for itself a wide following thanks to its release on video. Havelock-Allan, with typical modesty, described himself as "a passenger" on that film. He knew that David Lean had no time for producers and said, "As a producer, I don't think he ever liked me. He only liked me as a friend." However, Lean remembered his old partner with warmth.

I wish one could talk to more people like you could talk to Tony . . . He's very nice and completely trustworthy. That's rare in a person, let alone a producer.

At the time of his death, Havelock-Allan had been working on an autobiography.

Kevin Brownlow