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Photo of Rudolph Cartier

Rudolph Cartier

Director, Producer, Writer, Additional Credits
Born April 17, 1904Died June 8, 1994 (90 years)
Rudolph Cartier (born Rudolph Kacser, renamed himself in Germany to Rudolph Katscher; 17 April 1904 – 7 June 1994) was an Austrian television director, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer who worked predominantly in British television, exclusively for the BBC. He is best known for his 1950s collaborations with screenwriter Nigel Kneale, most notably the Quatermass serials and their 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

After studying architecture and then drama, Cartier began his career as a screenwriter and then film director in Berlin, working for UFA Studios. After a brief spell in the United States he moved to the United Kingdom in 1935. Initially failing to gain a foothold in the British film industry, he began working for BBC Television in the late 1930s (among other productions he was involved in the making of Rehearsal for a Drama, BBC 1939). The outbreak of war, however, meant that his contract was terminated; his television play The Dead Eye was stopped in the production stage. After the war, he occasionally worked for British films before he was again hired by the BBC in 1952. He soon became one of the public service broadcaster's leading directors and went on to produce and direct over 120 productions in the next 24 years, ending his television career with the play Loyalties in 1976.

Active in both dramatic programming and opera, Cartier won the equivalent of a BAFTA in 1957 for his work in the former, and one of his operatic productions was given an award at the 1962 Salzburg Festival. The British Film Institute's "Screenonline" website describes him as "a true pioneer of television", while the critic Peter Black once wrote that: "Nobody was within a mile of Rudolph Cartier in the trick of making a picture on a TV screen seem as wide and as deep as CinemaScope."

Known For

  • Quatermass and the Pit
  • Corridor of Mirrors
  • Quatermass II
  • Fall of Eagles
  • Anna Karenina
  • Maigret (1960)
  • Storm Over Jamaica
  • The Shot in the Talker Studio

Filmography

1974
Fall of Eagles (TV Series)
1969
1966
1965
Play of the Month (TV Series)
1965
1965
Out of the Unknown (TV Series)
1964
1964
The Wednesday Play (TV Series)
1964
The Midnight Men (TV Series)
1964
Theatre 625 (TV Series)
1962
Suspense (1962) (TV Series)
1962
Z Cars (TV Series)
1961
1961
1960
1959
Maigret (1960) (TV Series)
1958
1958
1957
1957
1955
Quatermass II (TV Series)
1954
1953
1950

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