Michael Blakemore, winner of a double Tony in one season for directing, dies at 95

Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died Sunday. He was 95.

His death was announced by him officers on Tuesday. It did not say where he died.

Mr. Blakemore was nominated for Tonys seven times, most notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” in 1983.

But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a group of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later play van Frayn, ‘Copenhagen’, which won him the unique double prize in 2000 for best direction of a musical and best direction of a play. musical, given to Brian Stokes Mitchell.)

Mr. Blakemore was born in Sydney, Australia, but built his career in Britain, first as an actor and later as one of Laurence Olivier’s associate directors at the National Theater in London.

There he staged a number of highly successful productions: “The National Health,” Mr. Nichols’s sardonic portrayal of British hospitals, and revivals of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s satire of newspaper journalism, and Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’, in which he directed Olivier.

It was widely believed that Mr Blakemore would succeed Olivier, who resigned as artistic director of the National in 1973. Instead, the theater appointed Peter Hall, whom Mr Blakemore had directed at Stratford-upon-Avon during his acting years and with whom he had an intense rivalry. Their relationship deteriorated and Mr Blakemore resigned in 1976.

But he continued as a freelance director. He staged Mr. Nichols’s “Privates on Parade,” a burlesque musical comedy set in post-World War II Malaysia, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he began a long association with Mr. Frayn in 1980 when he produced his drama ‘Make and Break’, about a businessman who loses his soul.

Then came Mr. Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an inventive farce about second-rate provincial thespians staging their own slapstick sex farce. It transferred from London to Broadway in 1983 and ran for 553 performances.

“’Noises Off’ couldn’t have arrived in New York a moment too early,” wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times. The show, he said, was “as cleverly conceived and deftly executed a farce as Broadway has seen in any era.”

It was a triumph which, Mr Blakemore later said, left him feeling that he had finally put an end to ‘the bad dream that the National had become’.

Michael Howell Blakemore was born on June 18, 1928 in Sydney, the son of Conrad Howell Blakemore, a leading eye surgeon, and Una Mary (Litchfield) Blakemore. He said he was a descendant of John Quincy Adams through his American grandmother, who supported Michael’s artistic inclinations while his father discouraged them. In the first of two memoirs, ‘Arguments With England’ (2004), Mr Blakemore described his father as an ‘unpredictable opponent’ who hated ‘scruffy bohemians and long-haired intellectuals’.

Mr Blakemore survived what he remembered as the “martinet discipline” of a boarding school, but not a medical degree that his father had persuaded him to pursue at the University of Sydney. “I solved the problem of how not to be a doctor by failing all my exams in the third year,” he said.

He was more fascinated by theater and film, especially American films of the 1930s and 1940s, but he saw Olivier as Richard III in Sydney. that inspired him to go to London to become an actor. He achieved that ambition thanks to another touring British actor, Robert Morley, who befriended the stage-struck Mr. Blakemore, employed him as his publicist and arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950.

After graduating in 1952, Mr. Blakemore was cast in a series of regional repertory productions. It wasn’t long before he was touring Europe as a Roman captain in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a revival starring Oliver and staged by the British director Peter Brook, who became an inspiration for Mr. Blakemore. Mr. Brook, he wrote, “had that concentration, somehow combining empathy and detachment, that I came to recognize as the mark of a good director.”

In 1959 he was at Stratford playing more Shakespeare – as the First Lord in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, in small parts in an Olivier-led ‘Coriolanus’, and alongside Charles Laughton in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, directed by the fast-rising Mr. Hall.

Mr. Blakemore had a difficult relationship from the start with Mr. Hall, who he felt had too intellectual an approach to directing. He also vied with Mr Hall for the affections of a company member, Vanessa Redgrave: “Vanessa’s lover was my enemy,” he later wrote. “I would have liked to kill him.” He found himself unwanted when Mr Hall began transforming Stratford’s summer repertoire into the Royal Shakespeare Company.

But by then Mr Blakemore was determined to become a director, and after playing major roles at the Open Air Theater in London’s Regents Park, he was asked to act and direct at the prestigious Citizens Theater in Glasgow. There he had his first major success in 1967 with ‘Joe Egg’, a darkly comic story about parents dealing with a severely disabled child. Mr. Blakemore had helped his friend, Mr. Nichols, rework the script, which had been rejected elsewhere. The play was transferred to London and then to Broadway (with Albert Finney and Zena Walker) with great success.

Olivier invited Mr Blakemore to the National in 1969, and he was appointed deputy director in 1971. When Mr Hall arrived in 1973 he retained Mr Blakemore in his position, but trouble soon followed.

In his second memoir, “Stage Blood” (2013), Mr. Blakemore gave his version of a conflict that culminated in Mr. Hall’s London apartment after he presented a paper to his national colleagues in which Mr. Hall accused of failing to consult with his subordinates and took too much paid work outside the National. However, he failed to win the support of his colleagues, and after telling Mr Hall that he was “an extremely greedy man”, Mr Blakemore resigned. (He later published in The Observer newspaper what he called “The Claudius Diaries,” a satire that named Olivier the murdered king in “Hamlet” and Mr. Hall his murderer.)

Mr. Blakemore was back at the National in 1997 and 2003 (Mr. Hall had resigned in 1988), staging “Copenhagen” (which opened on Broadway in 2000) and “Democracy” (which transferred in 2004), productions which is his ability to bring clarity to extremely complex works. ‘Copenhagen’ focuses on a discursive, argumentative conversation that physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had in 1941, partly about the construction of an atomic bomb. ‘Democracy’ revolves around West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and an East German spy who falls in love with him.

Grappling with complexity was a strength that Mr. Blakemore in 1989 also brought to “City of Angels,” an intricate Broadway musical with music by Cy Coleman, a book by Larry Gelbart and lyrics by David Zippel, which earned him a Tony nomination for his direction.

Known for his calmness in the rehearsal room and, in his words, for “getting my way without anyone particularly noticing,” Mr. Blakemore defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a collection of disparate talents.”

It was an ideal he tried to achieve, mostly successfully, in other Broadway productions, including the 1997 Coleman musical “The Life,” a belated world premiere for Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” in 2007 and in 2009 a revival of Noël Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit’, with Angela Lansbury at her funniest as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.

Mr. Blakemore was married twice: in 1960 to Shirley Bush, with whom he had a son, and, after their divorce in 1986, to Tanya McCallin, with whom he had two daughters. He and Ms. McCallin later separated, according to the news release announcing Mr. Blakemore’s death. He is survived by Mrs. McCallin; his children, Conrad, Beatrice and Clemmie; and three grandchildren.

Alex Marshall reporting contributed.