It's being reported that director Don Sharp has died at the age of 89. He directed a lot of tremendously entertaining stuff in his time.
Director Don Sharp Dies: Worked with Deborah Kerr, Christopher Lee, Lee Remick, Vanessa Redgrave
According to various online sources, Tasmanian-born director Don Sharp has died. He was 89.
A former small-time actor (The Planter's Wife, The Cruel Sea), Sharp (born April 19, 1922, in Hobart) is best remembered for several low-budget thrillers he directed in the 1960s, such as Hammer's The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), the sci-fier Curse of the Fly (1965), and the The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), starring Christopher Lee as the East Asian fiend.
Sharp's other notable efforts include Psychomania (1973), about a youth gang terrorizing a small town; the IRA drama Hennessy (1975), with A-listers Rod Steiger and Lee Remick; The Thirty Nine Steps, an underrated remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 classic starring Robert Powell in Robert Donat's old man-on-the-run role; and the slow-moving adventure drama Bear Island, featuring Vanessa Redgrave and Donald Sutherland.
Sharp also worked on British television, directing several episodes from The Avengers. Other notable television efforts were a made-for-TV remake of The Four Feathers (1978) starring Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour, and the miniseries A Woman of Substance (1984) and its sequel, Hold the Dream (1986). Adapted from novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford, the latter two are made watchable by the presence of Deborah Kerr, who, as the rags-to-riches businesswoman, elevates the cheesy proceedings to the realm of compelling melodrama whenever she is on screen. Jenny Seagrove plays the young Kerr in both films; the extensive supporting cast features old and new talent, among them John Mills, Liam Neeson, Miranda Richardson, Barry Bostwick, Diane Baker, George Baker, Peter Chelsom, Gayle Hunnicutt, and Christopher Gable.
Sharp's last credits were several episodes of the television series Act of Will (1989), another adaptation of a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel.
Please R.I.P.
Alan French.
R I P DON, you will be remembered.
Sad news.
RIP Mr Sharp.
Very sad news indeed.
R.I.P. Don Sharp.
Don Sharp directed one of my all time favourite films - The Face Of Fu Manchu (1965).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuJRxviIAbA
Don Sharp also directed several other films that i have always liked - The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), The Brides Of Fu Manchu (1966), Psychomania (1973), Callan (1974) and The Thirty Nine Steps (1978).
RIP. He made a little gem in Witchcraft (1964).
I'd second thatOriginally Posted by DB7
RIP Don - often a cinematic alchemist
Very sad. He directed my two favourite Tara King episodes of The Avengers and my favourite episode of Hammer House Of Horror. He also directed what I thought was one of the better episodes of The Champions.
Don Sharp.
wec
Don Sharp also did a bit of 2nd unit work including this excellent boat chase from Puppet On a Chain in 1970.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqdP9c0tp9Q
Nice thought Windy, and spot on too - Don often made magic with what very little he was given. Safe pair of hands, most definitely.
R.I.P. Mr. Sharp.
Respect,
Smudge
Last edited by smudge; 20-12-11 at 01:19 PM.
"Safe pair of hands" is exactly how I would describe Don Sharp. His name in the credits is a guarantee you'll at the very least be entertained. Always had a particular soft spot for Rasputin the Mad Monk, though on a technical level, The Kiss of the Vampire is outstanding.
I agree completely. The Kiss of the Vampire is a superb work by Don Sharp.
Very sad news ... I loved Don's direction of the thrilling speedboat chase through the canals of Amsterdam in Puppet on a Chain.
RIP Don Sharp
Emma
Last edited by batman; 25-12-11 at 12:12 PM.
Always enjoyed Don's work, sad news indeed....
Guardian obituary
Don Sharp obituary
In 1962, Don Sharp was a minor ex-actor, hack writer and jobbing director of British B-films, when he was offered the chance to make a gothic horror movie for Hammer, "the studio that dripped blood". In the event, The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) rescued both Sharp, who has died aged 89, and Hammer from the doldrums.
The studio, which had suffered several expensive flops, turned to Sharp due to his experience in low-budget film-making. Sharp, who claimed to have never watched a horror movie, let alone directed one, quickly steeped himself in the Hammer style by spending a week or so watching past successes, principally those directed by Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis. The Kiss of the Vampire, made with a smaller budget and an unstarry cast, recruited mostly from television, scored at the box office, and Sharp became associated with horror movies thereafter.
He was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and enlisted in the Australian air force in 1941. After his discharge in 1944, Sharp worked as an actor on stage and radio throughout Australia and in Japan. He moved to England in 1949 and appeared as a young bargeman off the Suffolk coast in Ha'penny Breeze (1950), which he co-wrote. Sharp had further roles, all in uniform, in The Planter's Wife (1952), Appointment in London (1953) and The Cruel Sea (1953), and a leading role in the BBC radio serial Journey into Space (1953).
His first directorial efforts, The Stolen Airliner (1955) and The Adventures of Hal 5 (1958), each running less than an hour, were made for the Children's Film Foundation, and shown mostly on Saturday mornings. Sharp graduated from kids' movies to teenage ones, such as The Golden Disc (1958), packed with forgotten British skiffle and rock'n'roll stars performing mainly in a faddish coffee bar, and It's All Happening (1963), in Eastmancolor, featuring a grinning, guitar-strumming Tommy Steele, who puts on a show to save the orphanage where he was brought up. The films Sharp made for grownups were the sort of second features that merely delayed the main attraction.
It was not until The Kiss of the Vampire that Sharp's name came into focus. The film's brilliantly conceived pre-credit sequence – a funeral during which a stake is driven through the lid of a coffin into the heart of a woman within – proved that this was going to be no run-of-the-mill assignment. Sharp, taking a slower pace than usual, kept it eerily atmospheric while limiting the amount of gore.
He made two more features for Hammer – The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), both starring a bearded Christopher Lee at his satanic best – but the majority of Sharp's horror movies could be called Hammeresque. Lee revived the novelist Sax Rohmer's oriental arch-villain to great effect in The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), both pacily directed by Sharp, who always treated such potentially trashy material with respect, allowing just enough kitsch to emerge.
Sharp demonstrated his ability to make the most of meagre budgets with Witchcraft (1964), set in 17th-century England, and elegantly shot in monochrome, and The Curse of the Fly (1965), the third film in a sci-fi series, with Brian Donlevy as the screwy scientist set on experimenting with what he calls "teleportation". The weirdest of Sharp's pictures was Psychomania (1972), in which the leader of a motorcycle gang learns the secret of immortality, kills himself, is buried on his bike and comes back to life to murder and terrorise forever. (It was the last film made by the actor George Sanders, who took his own life shortly afterwards.)
Away from the horror genre, Sharp made a few undervalued movies such as the spy spoof Our Man in Marrakech (1966) and the tense thriller The Violent Enemy (1967), about IRA activities. Sharp must also be given credit for having the chutzpah to tackle The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978), the third film adaptation of John Buchan's espionage novel. Although it cannot compare to Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version, it is more faithful to the source material and climaxes excitingly with Robert Powell (as Richard Hannay) clinging to Big Ben.
Sharp also risked negative comparisons with The Four Feathers (1978), the sixth adaptation of AEW Mason's colonial novel, which he made for television. His other work on television included some episodes of The Avengers (1968) and the mini-series A Woman of Substance (1984), a period soap opera based on Barbara Taylor Bradford's bestselling historical romance.
• Donald Herman Sharp, film and television director, born 19 April 1922; died 18 December 2011
Don Sharp, left, during the filming of The Four Feathers, adapted from AEW Mason's colonial novel.
The 39 Steps is my favourite version.
RIP Mr. Sharpe
Paul
Obituary: Don Sharp - Director whose range encompassed The Thirty-Nine Steps to Hammer horrors - Obituaries - Scotsman.com
Obituary: Don Sharp - Director whose range encompassed The Thirty-Nine Steps to Hammer horrors
Published on Wednesday 21 December 2011 00:00
Born: 19 April, 1921, in Hobart, Tasmania. Died: 18 December, 2011, aged 90
DON Sharp came from a generation when it was possible to work your way to the top in the film business doing pretty much anything and everything. A child actor in Australia, he came to Britain in the late 1940s, made several films with Hammer and Christopher Lee and directed the third and most faithful adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in south-west Scotland.
Alfred Hitchcock�s 1935 version of John Buchan�s classic spy yarn was set largely in the Highlands and shot mainly in the studio in London. The 1959 remake took Hitchcock as its template. Sharp, however, went back to the original novel for his film in 1978. It had a period setting, before the First World War. The eponymous steps were actual, physical steps, not a secret organisation, as Hitchcock would have it. And Sharp shot in the area that had provided the setting in the original story.
He filmed at various locations in the south-west, including Castlemilk House, near Lockerbie; Morton Castle, near Thornhill; the village of Durisdeer, the Forest of Ae and the Duke of Buccleuch�s Drumlanrig estate, although the railway scenes were done on the Severn Valley Railway. However, Sharp departed from Buchan�s storyline for the climax. His denouement was much more cinematic with the hero, played by Robert Powell, famously dangling from the hands of Big Ben.
Donald Herman Sharp was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1921 according to military records, though reference sources invariably give his year of birth as 1922. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Australian Air Force and with the coming of the peace he did as many of his countrymen did and headed for England.
Initially, he found work mainly as an actor. He had a major role in Ha�penny Breeze, a 1950 B-movie that he co-wrote and which mixed yachting and romance. He played an officer in The Cruel Sea, but seemed to be slipping down cast lists, rather than rising up them.
By the mid-1950s he had moved behind the camera. He served as second unit director on the classic war film Carve Her Name with Pride and he directed films for the Children�s Film Foundation and episodes of the police TV series Ghost Squad.
Sharp first tapped into the developing youth music scene with the 1958 film The Golden Disc and he married one of the actresses, Mary Steele.
He subsequently worked with Tommy Steele, one of Britain�s biggest pop stars, on It�s All Happening. It was 1963 and the whole British scene was exploding with the emergence of the Beatles, the Stones and their contemporaries, and Sharp was well-qualified to help the new stars realise their big-screen ambitions. He chose instead to throw in his lot with Hammer Films, which had reinvigorated the horror genre in the late 1950s, but was seeing shrinking returns on rising budgets.
Hammer was keen to hire Sharp because he had a reputation of delivering value for money, though he had reputedly never even watched a horror film before. He immersed himself in the genre and made an immediate impact with the first, highly atmospheric scene of The Kiss of the Vampire, in which a spade is driven straight through the lid of a coffin, eliciting a spine-tingling scream and flow of crimson.
The Kiss of the Vampire was made with a largely unfamiliar (ie cheap) cast. Sharp did get the chance to work with one of Hammer�s biggest stars on The Devil-Ship Pirates. It was the first of six films he would make with Christopher Lee over a 15-year period from the mid-1960s to late 1970s.
Sharp directed Lee in Rasputin the Mad Monk and as the old oriental villain Fu Manchu in The Face of Fu Manchu and its sequel, The Brides of Fu Manchu. They also worked together on Dark Places and finally on Bear Island, an adaptation of one of the novels by the best-selling Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean, about lost Nazi gold. It was shot on location in Alaska and Canada and also starred Donald Sutherland and Vanessa Redgrave.
Unusually for a director who was finding regular employment in films, Sharp also continued to work in television, directing episodes of The Avengers and The Champions; a memorable version of The Four Feathers, with Powell, Simon Ward, Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour; an adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford�s A Woman of Substance, starring Jenny Seagrove; and Tusitala, a mini-series about Robert Louis Stevenson on Samoa.
Sharp also continued his relationship with Hammer on the small screen, directing one of the stories in the much-loved Hammer House of Horror series. His last credit was for another Taylor Bradford mini-series, Act of Will, in 1989. In his memoirs Tall, Dark and Gruesome, Lee paid the director the compliment of saying Sharp �knew as much as anybody about directing�. BRIAN PENDREIGH
Very sad news, I have some nice memories of working for Don Sharp, as an extra on "Rasputin The Mad Monk" and as a stand-in on "The Four Feathers" "Psychomania" and
"The Thirty Nine Steps" it was a pleasure working for him, a very good director and also a lovely man, he has a son Mathew Sharp, who is an assistant director.
It was nice knowing you Don, R. I. P.
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