Michael Blakemore

Blakemore helmed a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nichols' "Privates on Parade" (1977) and later made his feature directing debut with the 1982 adaptation starring John Cleese. His long association with playwright Michael Frayn began on the National's "The Cherry Orchard" (1973), for which Frayn served as translator, and continued with the first of many Frayn plays, "Make and Break" in 1980. Taking Broadway by storm with Frayn's farcical "Noises Off" (1984), he earned a Drama Desk Award and Tony nomination for directing, and when he assumed the helm of "Copenhagen" in 1999, it was the eighth Frayn play he had directed. He returned to the ranks of Tony-nominated directors with the Larry Gelbart-Cy Coleman-David Zippel film noir musical "City of Angels" (1989), though the show itself fell short of becoming a standard of the American musical theater repertoire. He garnered another Tony nod for "Lettuce and Loveage" (1990), which he had originally directed in London's West End in 1987. Blakemore wrote and helmed the feature "Country Life" (1994), a classy Australian spin on Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," and also had great fun playing the long-absent, pompous bore Alexander, who has left the London literary scene in disgrace to return Down Under. "Country Life" represented a major advance as a film director over his previous entry, thanks in large part to the down-to-earth humor of his script. Reteaming with Cy Coleman on "The Life" (1997) brought him another Tony nomination, but its chronicle of gold-hearted hookers and their mean old pimps strained audience credulity. He became the first director to earn two Tony awards in the same year for his work on a pair of vastly different projects. First came a nimble revival of "Kiss Me, Kate" (1999), faithful to the original. Making no apologies for loose ends, thin characters and pat ending, he allowed John Guare to tinker only slightly with the book. Then Frayn's dramatically taut "Copenhagen" (2000) arrived from London full of intelligence, demanding audiences to listen carefully. The richly metaphorical play imagined an actual meeting between physicist Niels Bohr and his beloved, Nazi-sympathizing protege Werner Heisenberg in the titular city and featured vibrant performances from Blair Brown, Philip Bosco and Michael Cumpsty. Michael Blakemore died on December 10, 2023 at the age of 95.