Director and producer Peter Morley, who was acclaimed for his work on the current affairs programme This Week and his coverage of Sir Winston Churchill’s state funeral, has died aged 91.
The filmmaker, who was a former chair of Bafta and was significant in its founding, was also responsible for the documentaries Kitty: Return To Auschwitz, Twenty Five Years and The Mighty Continent and directed other films and documentaries for television.
We are saddened to learn that filmmaker and former BAFTA Chair Peter Morley has passed away: https://t.co/3jhx93IDFd pic.twitter.com/hqKWyakolt
— BAFTA (@BAFTA) June 27, 2016
He worked with Lord Attenborough, Lord Brabourne and Richard Cawston in 1972 as a founder trustee of the Society of Film and Television Arts, which is now Bafta, to establish the academy’s permanent headquarters in London’s Piccadilly.
Born in Germany in 1924, he emigrated to the UK after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and began his showbusiness career as a rewind-boy in the projection box of the capital’s Dominion Theatre before becoming a projectionist for The Film Producer’s Guild and then a trainee director at Associated Rediffusion at the advent of ITV.
Mr Morley (second from the left) with Richard Attenborough (left), Lord Mountbatten and the Queen in 1976 (BAFTA)
He worked on the channel’s first hour-long documentary Tyranny – The Years Of Adolf Hitler in 1959 and a live television production of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn Of The Screw in the same year.
He was later awarded the Royal Television Society Silver Medal for Lord Mountbatten: A Man For The Century in 1968 and the Royal Television Society Documentary Award for Kitty – Return To Auschwitz in 1979 and was made an OBE.
By his own estimation he directed some 200 programmes over the span of a long and distinguished career, Bafta said, and he recounts his many achievements in his autobiography A Life Rewound.
He died on June 23.
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