Film and television director;
Film and television director;
Born: May 27, 1951; Died: October 25, 2013.
Antonia Bird, who has died aged 62, was a film and television director whose work frequently tackled controversial social issues. Her most famous film Priest starred Linus Roache as a Catholic priest who struggles with his sexuality and his ongoing affair with a man played by Robert Carlyle. Bird and Carlyle also ran a production company with Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting and the film critic Mark Cousins.
Much of the rest of Bird's work reflects the same determination as Priest to address important social issues, up to and including her most recent work for the BBC, The Village, a drama series which followed a family struggling to make ends meet in a grim Derbyshire village. It showed poverty and abuse in the most stark terms.
However, Bird never sacrificed drama for social awareness, which may have been due to her history as a director of soap opera (in the mid to late 80s, she directed episodes of EastEnders, The Bill and Casualty); she also made episodes of Inspector Morse and Peak Practice.
She was born in London and began working in theatre when she was only 17. She worked in a number of roles including stage management, acting, publicity and directing. Among her early work was a version of What The Butler Saw by Joe Orton at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester. She also worked at the Young Vic and in 1978 became a resident director at the Royal Court.
By the mid 1980s, she had decided that her future lay in television. One of her first jobs was the BBC's new soap opera EastEnders, which started in 1985; she worked on 15 episodes for the first series. She then moved on Casualty among other popular shows.
Priest was her first feature film. Made in 1994 and written by Jimmy McGovern, the creator of Cracker, it followed the story of a priest who arrives in a new parish and struggles to keep his vows after starting a relationship with a man he meets in a gay bar. Made as part of the BBC's Screen Two series, it was shown in 1995, at a time when television had still to learn how to deal directly and openly with the issue of homosexuality.
The priest's lover was played by Carlyle, who went on to develop a close professional and personal relationship with Bird. As well as running their production company, 4Way Pictures, together, they collaborated on a further two films: the 1997 gangster movie Face and Ravenous, a 1999 historical drama in which Carlyle played a cannibal.
Among Bird's most important work was Safe, a 1993 film for BBC2 about homeless teenagers in London, and Care in 2000, again for the BBC, which explored the issue of sexual abuse in children's homes.
She won many awards including Baftas for Safe and Care; she also won a Bafta Children's Award for Off By Heart, a documentary about poetry in schools. Priest was also voted best film at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the people's choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article