JOHN IRVIN
(7 May 1940 – 11 August 2026)
The English film and television director John Irvin, who has died aged 86 from complications with cancer, was a filmmaker of some importance. Not for him did he make anything that was just entertainment for entertainment’s sake. In the event, however, he produced a well-regarded body of work. Irvin directed the Bafta-winning TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from John Le Carré’s novel as well as the feature films The Dogs of War, Champions, Turtle Diary, Hamburger Hill, Robin Hood, Next of Kin and many others, totalling over twenty titles between 1980 and 2016. His television work also included Haunted, The Nearly Man, Hard Times, All for Love and When Trumpets Fade.
John Charles Greenaway Irvin was born in Wallasey on Merseyside to a mechanical engineer. He attended Durham School and College and later graduated from the London Film School. Early on he joined the Free Cinema movement of independent filmmaking where he shot a documentary on the Algerian War of Independence, a film of the Vietnam War, and Mafia No!, the latter which was nominated for a Bafta. During the 1970s he mostly worked in television where the culmination of his talents was best seen in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) with a magnificent performance by Alec Guinness as George Smiley. The serial received critical acclaim, four Bafta nominations (and a win for Guinness) and an Emmy nod.
His work in Hollywood included The Dogs of War (1980) about a team of mercenaries at war in Africa led by Christopher Walken. Champions (1984) was about the jockey Bob Champion with John Hurt in the saddle. Turtle Diary (1985) had an ecological theme with a couple (Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley) out to release a pair of turtles from the zoo. Raw Deal was an action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a small-town sheriff infiltrating the Chicago Mafia. In 1987 John Irvin directed the uncompromising Hamburger Hill set in Vietnam about US soldiers attacking a North Vietnam Army position. There was also the crime thriller Shiner with Michael Caine, the Anglo-Canadian thriller The Fourth Angel with Jeremy Irons and Forest Whitaker, and the Anglo-Spanish thriller The Garden of Eden from the novel by Ernest Hemingway. The director himself appeared in The Writer with No Hands, a documentary about the screenwriter Gary DeVore, with whom he had worked on The Dogs of War and Raw Deal. Irvin’s last film (in 2016) was the South African Mandela’s Gun, about Nelson Mandela’s days as a guerilla fighter.
John Irvin proved what a good director he was in the range of subjects he chose. Not one to rest on his laurels, he really only wished to make stories of some substance or themes that would interest him as a documentarian. John Irvin was married to Sophie Litchfield from 1970 to 1991 (until her death from cancer) and they had three children, Emilie, Luke and Amy.
MICHAEL DARVELL