Anthony Harvey (3 June 1930 – 23 November 2017) was an English filmmaker who began his career as a teenage actor, was a film editor in the 1950s and moved into directing in the mid-1960s. Harvey had fifteen film credits as an editor, and he directed thirteen films. The second film that Harvey directed, The Lion in Winter (1968), earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. Harvey's career is also notable for his recurring work with a number of leading actors and directors including Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Katharine Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, Richard Attenborough, Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston, Nick Nolte, the Boulting Brothers, Anthony Asquith, Bryan Forbes and Stanley Kubrick. He died in November 2017 at the age of 87.
Biography
Harvey was born in London in 1930. His father died when he was young and he was raised and took his name from his stepfather, actor and writer Morris Harvey. He began his screen career as an actor while a teenager and made his first film appearance playing Ptolemy, the younger brother of Cleopatra (played by Vivien Leigh, an acquaintance of his step-father) in the film version of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), where he recalled that he was "looked after" by star Claude Rains. Harvey gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but, although he worked for a time in repertory theatre, realised that he was not likely to be successful as an actor and decided to move into film-making.
Career as film editor
Harvey was taken on as an assistant editor by the Boulting Brothers (Roy Boulting and John Boulting). He soon found himself in high demand, and went on to edit a sequence of British films in the 1950s and early 1960s, developing fruitful working relationships with several major directors of the period including Anthony Asquith, Roy and John Boulting, Bryan Forbes, Martin Ritt, and UK-based American director Stanley Kubrick.
Harvey's first film as editor was the Anthony Asquith short On Such A Night (1956), followed by his first feature assignment, the Ealing war comedy Private's Progress (also 1956), starring Richard Attenborough and Terry-Thomas. His subsequent work as an editor included Roy Boulting's comedies Brothers in Law (1957) and Happy Is the Bride (1958), the drama Tread Softly Stranger (1958) directed by Gordon Parry, the political comedy Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (aka The Man in the Cocked Hat, 1959), and I'm All Right Jack (also 1959). Harvey edited the industrial drama The Angry Silence (1960), directed by Guy Green, and the Anthony Asquith comedy The Millionairess (also 1960), which starred Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren.
Harvey worked with both Bryan Forbes and Stanley Kubrick, editing Forbes' drama The L-Shaped Room and Kubrick's adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita (both 1962). His collaboration with Stanley Kubrick began after Harvey called Kubrick up out of the blue and asked if they could work together. After Lolita, he worked with Kubrick again on Dr Strangelove (1964). This was followed by the spy thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), directed by Martin Ritt from the John le Carré novel.
In a 2014 conversation with broadcaster Walker Vreeland, Harvey recalled his working relationship with Kubrick:
"Every moment I spent with him, I never learned so much about movies. He said that when you have a close-up and you have two wonderful actors, don't go backward and forward, leave the actor that was marvellous and stay on that shot. It's a much better way of putting a film together.
"We had a great friendship. He used to sack me every now and then and say, 'Go home and don't come back!' But the next day, [it was] 'Hello, Tony, how are you?' It was a sort of joke. Because I was quite determined to put my stuff that I cut on the movie.
"He said that I was becoming more impossible than Peter Sellers. He said, 'You'd better hurry up and direct, then you won't be so annoying in the cutting rooms.'"
Harvey's last two credits as an editor were his own directorial debut Dutchman (1966) and The Whisperers (1967), his last collaboration with Bryan Forbes.
Career as director
Harvey's first feature film as a director was a monochrome short subject, the intense one-hour race relations drama Dutchman (1966), which depicts a fateful encounter between a black man and a white woman on the New York subway. Although it did not receive a wide release, it was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.