(15 October 1944 - 5 October 2021)
The British writer-director Barney Platts-Mills, who has died aged 76, seemed to be a new hope for independent British cinema in the 1970s. However, he directed just four feature films and a few documentaries while the rest of his career was taken up with other projects mostly encouraging young people into the film business. He made an initial splash with his first feature, Bronco Bullfrog (1969), for which he worked with young amateurs from Stratford in east London. It depicts the lives of street youths who become (very) minor criminals in their attempts at robbery. The film focuses on Del (Del Walker) and Irene (Anne Gooding) who get together in an effort to escape their miserable daily lives. The film won an award at Cannes and a Screenwriters' Guild award for Best Original Screenplay. This was followed in 1971 by Private Road, about Peter, a writer (Bruce Robinson), who meets Ann, a receptionist (Susan Penhaligon), who then go off to live in Scotland. The relationship falters when Ann becomes pregnant. The film won the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
Barney Platts-Mills began his film career in 1960 as an assistant editor at Shepperton Studios working on productions such as Spartacus, The Greengage Summer and A Kind of Loving. He also did some editing for television. In 1966 with his Maya Films company he made documentaries on David Hockney and the St Christopher's Rudolf Steiner Schools. He made the short films The War, with Colin Welland and Eric Burdon, and Everybody's an Actor, Shakespeare Said, about the theatre director Joan Littlewood. Later he wrote a screenplay, Double Trouble, which was published as a novel but never filmed. Other works included Hero, made in Gaelic for Film Four with youths from a Glasgow street gang. Ebb Tide, based on a story set in Sri Lanka by Robert Louis Stevenson, was cast with Harry Dean Stanton and Christopher Lee but remained unmade when war broke out in Sri Lanka. Platts-Mills made a TV documentary for Channel Four's Dispatches series and he worked with young offenders and on various other youth projects. In 2000 he moved to Morocco and wrote Zohra: A Moroccan Fairytale which he eventually filmed in 2010. Barney Platts-Mills married and divorced Caroline Younger and is survived by his partner Catriona Guinness and his two children, Ruby and Roland, from another relationship.
MICHAEL DARVELL
