TV writer Iain MacCormick, left, works with director Alvin Rakoff at a console table on June 1, 1954. Mr. Rakoff directed more than 100 productions on TV, film and in theatre and worked with the cream of the British acting world from Peter Sellers to Sir Laurence Olivier.Evening Standard/Getty Images
It was 1957 and Alvin Rakoff, a rising young television director at the BBC, was in charge of the production for Requiem for a Heavyweight, a drama by Rod Serling about a washed-up professional boxer.
The play had been a big success on American TV but because shows in the early days of TV were broadcast live, the BBC had decided to do its own version of the play. The Toronto-born Mr. Rakoff, who had arrived just five years earlier in the U.K., was already making a name for himself as a talented, versatile director.
Mr. Rakoff, who died on Oct. 12 in London at the age of 97, was soon faced with a crisis. Just days before rehearsals were to begin, Jack Palance, who had starred in the U.S. production, pulled out of a deal to play the same role in the British adaptation. Mr. Rakoff scheduled a series of last-minute auditions and wasn’t convinced he had found a decent alternative.
Actress Jacqueline Hill, who had a part in the play and was also Mr. Rakoff’s girlfriend and future wife, suggested Sean Connery, an unknown bit actor, for the lead role.
“He was a big risk,” Mr. Rakoff later recalled. “He was not a great actor. He was a mumbler. … He had never played a major role in his life and it showed.” Yet the young Mr. Connery had presence and Mr. Rakoff decided to give him a chance.
And the Scottish actor came through. “This was his big break,” Mr. Rakoff said. Also cast in the production of Requiem for a Heavyweight was another unknown actor, Michael Caine.
A few years later, Mr. Rakoff got a call from film producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, who were deciding who to cast in Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. Their choice was between Patrick McGoohan, Roger Moore and Sean Connery. Mr. Rakoff, who had worked with all three, said Mr. McGoohan was the best actor, Mr. Moore was the most affable person to work with but in the end suggested that Mr. Connery would be the best choice for the role. The actor went on to do seven Bond movies. Mr. Connery died in 2020.
In his decades as a director of more than100 productions on TV, film and in theatre, Mr. Rakoff worked with the cream of the British acting world from Peter Sellers to Sir Laurence Olivier. Stephen Fry, commenting on Mr. Rakoff’s death, called him “a giant of film, theatre and TV.” Judi Dench said he was “a very endearing person.” Mr. Rakoff also wrote three novels, a couple of memoirs and many screenplays.
It was a long way from Toronto’s Kensington Market, where he was born Abraham Rakoff on Feb. 6, 1927. He was the third of seven children of Sam Rakoff and his wife, Pearl (née Isenberg), who ran a dry goods store on Baldwin Street, and he was known to his family as Alvin.
“My father was always going broke,” Mr. Rakoff later told The Canadian Jewish News. “He was a lousy businessman. He struggled to feed us and often didn’t succeed. Often the social welfare did help to feed us. We all knew what it was like to go to bed hungry.” He later mined those experiences in a memoir-like novel titled Baldwin Street.
After working as a reporter in Canada, Mr. Rakoff was encouraged by friends to try his luck in London, where he began writing for the BBC and was invited to join the broadcaster’s training course for directors, at age 26.Evelyn Klebanoff/The Canadian Press
He graduated with a degree from the University of Toronto and decided with an older brother to take over the family business. But before starting work at the store, he took a weekend trip to New York, where he managed to secure a ticket to the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring a young Marlon Brando. He was hooked. “I came out of the theatre determined to get into the creative world.”
Returning to Canada, Mr. Rakoff got a reporting job with the Northern Daily News in Kirkland Lake, Ont., and wrote for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the CBC. Encouraged by friends to try his luck in London, he promised his mother before he left that he would be back in three months. He never returned to Canada to live permanently again.
He soon began writing for the BBC and was invited to join the broadcaster’s training course for directors, at 26 becoming the youngest director at BBC Drama.
It proved to be a heady time for young Canadian creative talent in the UK. Mordecai Richler, Ted Allan, Ted Kotcheff, Sydney Newman and others all left Canada for England in the 1950s and made names for themselves in UK TV and film, according to Richler biographer Charles Foran. “It is striking how many of them [Canadians] there were, how young they were and how quickly they found work,” Mr. Foran said in an interview, noting that several of these young Canadians, including Mr. Rakoff and the actor Lorne Greene, would play poker together in London, calling their informal group the Canadian Club.
Mr. Rakoff won two Emmy Awards, the first in 1967, for Call Me Daddy, starring Donald Pleasance, a creepy tale of a man who blackmails a young woman into living with him for a week. Retitled Hoffman, it was turned into a feature film directed by Mr. Rakoff and starring Peter Sellers.
Mr. Rakoff and Mr. Sellers became good friends but the mercurial Mr. Sellers turned on the film and disowned it in a fit of rage. “I never thought he [Mr. Sellers] was crazy but I think he did need help,” Mr. Rakoff told a BBC interviewer in 2021.
His second Emmy came in 1982 for A Voyage Round My Father, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier, whom Mr. Rakoff recalled as a meticulous and demanding actor. It was Mr. Rakoff’s proudest achievement, even though Sir Laurence was ill and weak at the time. “He was aging badly and we did one scene where he couldn’t remember the lines or the moves or anything else.” Only skilful editing saved the scene.
The Financial Times called A Voyage Round My Father “a work of great power.”
Mr. Rakoff’s career was mainly on TV, something which he occasionally regretted, musing that he only made a dozen films and wished he had made more. Four of those films were made in Canada in the late 1970s and proved an unhappy experience.
The Canadian government had decided to kickstart the Canadian movie industry by offering generous tax shelters, which resulted in films that were not necessarily the best in terms of creative quality.
The most notorious was City on Fire, a disaster movie seeking to emulate the success of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Directed by Mr. Rakoff and starring Henry Fonda and Ava Gardner, it was set in Montreal, standing in for a corrupt American metropolis, where an oil refinery explodes in the middle of the city, leading to a spectacular conflagration.
The critics were devastating. Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail called City on Fire “infernally bad” and “a mindlessly misanthropic, Canadian-produced film that manages to prove that we can be as execrably tasteless as the most philistine mogul.” Mr. Rakoff’s other Canadian-made films were similarly panned by the critics.
Mr. Rakoff commented later that the budding Canadian film industry should try to reflect the nation’s realities and “stop trying to make pictures that Hollywood doesn’t really want to make.”
Incredibly prolific, Mr. Rakoff did his last TV production in 1997 but continued to direct plays into his 80s, frequently at The Mill at Sonning, a theatre where his second wife, Sally Hughes, is artistic director. And he kept on writing as well. “He didn’t stop,” said his son John Rakoff, a London-based film producer.
The younger Mr. Rakoff called his father “the most marvellous father in the world,” who was always supportive of his children and a man you could be proud of. Growing up in the Rakoff home in the London bedroom suburb of Chiswick, he could remember finding Sir Laurence Olivier or Angela Lansbury round the family dinner table.
“Sir Laurence Olivier wouldn’t work with anyone else on his final productions,” John Rakoff told The Globe and Mail.
Ms. Hill, Mr. Rakoff’s first wife, died in 1993. He leaves his wife of 30 years, Ms. Hughes; daughter, Sasha; son, John; stepson, Adam; five grandchildren; and his sister, Lorraine, who lives in Toronto.
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