Rudolph Cartier

Birthday: 1904-04-17
Deathday: 1994-06-08
Birthplace: Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
Gender: Male

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."

Credits

Year Title
1976-02-29 Loyalties
1970-07-23 Recht auf Gewissen
1969-05-11 An Ideal Husband
1969-01-08 Der spanische Bürgerkrieg
1968-01-10 The News-Benders
1966-10-27 Level Seven
1966-07-13 Alibi für James
1964-12-09 The July Plot
1964-11-27 Das Haus der Vergeltung
1964-05-10 Legende einer Liebe
1962-06-20 Der Kronanwalt
1962-05-10 Wuthering Heights
1961-11-03 Anna Karenina
1961-06-12 Adventure Story
1958-09-25 Storm Over Jamaica
1956-05-29 Gaslicht
1954-12-16 Nineteen Eighty-Four
1953-12-06 Wuthering Heights
1952-10-21 The Dybbuk
1935-11-22 Liebe auf Bretteln
1933-09-26 Unsichtbare Gegner
1933-07-14 The Oil Sharks
1932-08-18 Teilnehmer antwortet nicht