As a baby, Norman Spencer was tantalised by his mother and father’ discuss of “transferring photos”, and would gaze perplexed on the work on the living-room wall. “I couldn’t perceive as a six-year-old how photos might transfer,” he instructed the British Leisure Historical past Undertaking in 1999. “I used to say to them, ‘Is it somebody behind that strikes issues?’”
His first cinema go to on the age of 9 cleared up the confusion, and ignited a ardour for movie that may endure for the following century. “I used to be hooked from that second onwards.”
Spencer, who has died aged 110, and was believed to be the second oldest individual within the UK, labored in numerous capacities – manufacturing supervisor, producer, often co-writer – on a few of David Lean’s best movies, together with Nice Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Summertime (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
The 2 males met at Denham Movie Studios, in Buckinghamshire, the place Spencer was a gofer and Lean an editor. “We had been each mad about movie and began going to the photographs along with our wives,” Spencer instructed the Guardian in 2014.
Their first collaboration was additionally Lean’s directing debut. As an assistant director on the wartime propaganda drama In Which We Serve (1942), which Lean co-directed with its author and star, Noël Coward, Spencer’s job included organising the sophisticated Dunkirk sequence, that includes the fifth Battalion Coldstream Guards.
Their participation got here on the insistence of the manufacturing’s technical adviser, the longer term Lord (Louis) Mountbatten, whose wartime exploits impressed Coward’s screenplay, and who couldn’t abide troopers being performed by abnormal extras.
Spencer known as the sequence “the toughest and most enjoyable work I’ve ever carried out in my life as an assistant director. I used to be completely worn out on the finish of the day with exhaustion and pleasure at the entire thing – it was marvellous.”
Nonetheless, there was a horrible accident on set within the aftermath of a staged explosion. Spencer accompanied one of many injured crew members, chief electrician Jock Dymore, who later died, to hospital. “Within the ambulance he was in a hysterical state of shock,” Spencer instructed Kevin Brownlow, creator of the 1996 biography David Lean. “I bear in mind when he was wheeled within the casualty division, the nurse opened the blanket, seemed on the physician and he shook his head. Jock died in about half an hour. He was burned away by this horrible flame … The scent of burned flesh is one thing I shall always remember.”
Spencer was unit supervisor on Lean’s movie of Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945). On Oliver Twist, his duties included discovering a child to play the hero as a new child. Spencer phoned a GP, who instructed him: “You’re in luck, as a result of I’m pregnant.” Six weeks later, her youngster was born, and Lean and his crew took a bit of the set’s wall to her residence and filmed the kid at only a day previous. “For the reason that child was a lady, she was named Olivia,” Spencer stated.
For Hobson’s Alternative (1954), he had a hand within the script and helped Lean with scouting areas in Salford. “One girl requested us into her home,” Spencer recalled. “She made us a cup of tea and stated, ‘Look, the wallpaper’s peeling.’ She thought we had been from the council.”
Their subsequent movie, the achingly romantic Summertime, arose “as a result of David couldn’t discover a topic. This turned his perennial drawback. It was one of many causes for the good gaps in his schedule. He used to get right into a creatively constipated state. One million prospects flooded by way of his mind however he couldn’t choose the fitting one.”
The producer Alexander Korda launched Lean to Arthur Laurents’s play The Time of the Cuckoo. The director disliked it, however was drawn to the thought of a straitlaced American who visits Venice solely to be bowled over by the Italians’ method to want.
Laurents delivered his personal adaptation, which Lean and Spencer then rewrote. “The play was virtually plotless, however we travelled removed from the unique, which was about this dumpy, middle-aged schoolmistress assembly this seedy, down-at-heel Italian,” stated Spencer. “Our script turned so bloody glamorous it wasn’t true.” Different writers contributed alongside the way in which, notably HE Bates, who earned a co-credit with Lean.
The movie was a delight, however Spencer was not impressed by its star, Katharine Hepburn. “She was a rattling good performer, however a horrible nuisance on a movie … Even on the times when she wasn’t known as, she’d be on set at half previous seven within the morning saying, ‘Now, how do you set the movie within the digicam?’” However, he labored along with her once more when he was an uncredited producer on All of a sudden, Final Summer season (1959), tailored by Gore Vidal from Tennessee Williams’s play, and likewise starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
It was whereas in Venice that Lean confirmed Spencer the novel that the producer Sam Spiegel had proposed as the premise for his subsequent movie: Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, set in a Japanese PoW camp in Thailand. However when Spiegel offered Lean with Carl Foreman’s screenplay, he was dismayed to seek out that it was a travesty of the ebook. “You and I are going to sit down down and open the ebook at web page one and begin once more,” Lean instructed Spencer.
This they duly did, working collectively for the following six weeks. It was Spencer who fielded the every day phonecalls from Spiegel to learn how the rewrite was going. Spencer was additionally available for casting conferences, together with a dinner with Cary Grant, who was briefly within the operating for the function of Shears, the US commander ultimately performed by William Holden.
Spiegel had his thoughts set on changing into Lean’s sole producer. “He now began making an attempt to winkle Norman Spencer away from David by providing him movies to supply,” wrote Brownlow. Certainly one of his ruses was to maintain Spencer busy with a potential venture known as Harmful Silence, which was to have starred Jack Lemmon. “It got here to nothing as a result of Spiegel didn’t need it to come back to something,” stated Spencer. “He simply needed to get me away from David.”
Regardless of this, Spencer was recruited by Spiegel as head of manufacturing in Morocco on Lawrence of Arabia. This was a logistical nightmare, starting with two months of conferences with King Hassan II, numerous authorities ministers and different officers earlier than Lean even arrived. Assorted diseases and illnesses befell the forged and crew as soon as filming was underway.
“All people went off their heads,” stated Spencer. “The warmth, the situations, the wind, the residing in tents … the military officer we had connected to us as navy adviser abruptly began taking pictures stay bullets out of his tent at evening. Something he noticed, he shot at. We needed to have him taken away.” It was to be Spencer’s final movie with Lean.
He was born in south London to Charles, an insurance coverage dealer, and Dorothy (nee Lauton), and raised in Billericay after which Leigh-on-Sea, each in Essex. Leaving college at 14, and possessing a flair for artwork, he acquired a job portray movie posters.
At 19, he was portray murals at a dance studio when he heard a few of the dancers discussing their work as movie extras. Following their lead, he appeared as an additional in movies reminiscent of Splinters within the Air, shot at Pinewood, and the Marlene Dietrich automobile Knight With out Armour (each 1937). The latter introduced him to Denham, the place he additionally labored as a clapper-loader and as a stand-in for stars reminiscent of George Formby.
His run of movies with Lean was practically over earlier than it started: he was known as as much as do his navy service, which prevented him from engaged on Lean and Coward’s This Completely satisfied Breed (1944). He was later medically discharged after a bout of pneumonia.
In 1963, he joined twentieth Century Fox as assistant chief of British and European manufacturing, and oversaw manufacturing schedules for movies together with Zorba the Greek (1964) and These Magnificent Males in Their Flying Machines (1965).
He produced the highway film thriller Vanishing Level (1971) and took particular satisfaction within the venture, which he had packaged from preliminary script thought to completed movie. It turned a cult favorite, and is referenced a number of occasions in Quentin Tarantino’s personal auto-based Demise Proof (2007).
Spencer later co-produced Cry Freedom (1987), which dramatised the friendship between the journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and the murdered activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) in apartheid South Africa. There was a sure circularity to that venture: its director Richard Attenborough had been within the forged of In Which We Serve, although his identify had by chance been omitted from the credit.
Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943. She died in 1998. He’s survived by their daughters, Sally-Jane and Sue, in addition to by 4 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
