TV director who went from Coronation Street to Charlie's Angels
Born: February 26, 1925;
Died: April 29, 2019
JOHN Llewellyn Moxey, who has died aged 94, was one of the most prolific directors of television drama, in Britain and in America. Gaining an early reputation with single plays in the 1950s and 60s, he proved as adept with the monochrome, North of England realism of Coronation Street (1961) and Z Cars (1962) as with the colourful Hawaiian escapism of Hawaii Five-O (1970) and Magnum, P.I. (1984-86), and the ultra-1980s stylings of Miami Vice (1984). In 1967, he directed Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers; nine years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, he remained among action heroines with the pilot for Charlie’s Angels.
He was born in Argentina, where his father was in charge of an outpost of the family’s fuel supplying business. Educated, for three terms, at Eastbourne College in Sussex, Moxey recalled having visited the small Nettlefold film studios in Walton-on-Thames “when I was 12 or 13”; following wartime service, he began work as an assistant director there, in 1947.
A studio manager and assistant producer for BBC TV, Moxey’s first live drama as sole producer was Waterloo (1953). As he recalled, “to have worked in the days of “steam television” was a great learning ground. It taught you a lot about editing because it was instant, you had to do it there and then.” During ITV’s first month on air, in October 1955, Moxey directed a Henry James adaptation, A Garden In The Sea, live from Associated-Rediffusion’s studios in Wembley.
Strikingly bald from middle age, often bespectacled, and sometimes pipe-smoking, Moxey was chosen to do six plays a year for ABC Television, including for the Sunday night flagship Armchair Theatre, by the formidable drama chief Sydney Newman in 1959. Newman explained that Moxey fulfilled the task’s requirements by being "talented, efficient and likeable. In the close team-work of TV drama production, this last point is far more important than one may think."
Moxey made his debut as a film director with City Of The Dead (1960), an atmospheric tale of witchcraft, with Christopher Lee. He used Lee again in Circus of Fear (1966), commenting later that unlike others, he received his salary in full from its producer, the nefarious Harry Alan Towers. Several of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series of B-movies, much repeated on ITV in later decades, highlighted Moxey’s ability to create claustrophobic tension between characters, a skill learned from the enforced low budgets and constricted sets he was often required to work with.
For Lew Grade’s ITC, Moxey directed episodes of The Saint and The Baron. His American relocation was at the suggestion of impresario David Susskind. One of Moxey’s greatest personal successes there was The Night Stalker (1972), at the time the highest rated made for TV movie ever shown. Its story of a cynical reporter (Darren McGavin) slowly realising a Las Vegas serial killer is actually a vampire was all the more effective for being played absolutely straight.
Like many British veterans on both sides of the camera, Moxey was given opportunities by Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote (1984-91).
His wife and two sons survive him.
GAVIN GAUGHAN
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