Hugh Hudson, film director best-known for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire – obituary

Hugh Hudson, who has died aged 86, had already made his mark as a maker of remarkable television commercials before directing the Oscar-winning Chariots Of Fire (1981), one of the most influential films of the 1980s, which briefly helped to revitalise the ailing British film industry.

It was Hudson’s debut as the director of a full-length feature, and undoubtedly his finest hour. The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won four, including Best Picture, but Hudson himself missed out on the award for Best Director. His follow-up, Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes, was respectfully received, but when his third film, Revolution (1985), about the American war of independence, was savaged by the critics, his career stalled.

Hudson was a virtual unknown when he took on Chariots Of Fire, an artful observation of two amateur runners, one a Jewish Englishman, the other a Scottish missionary, as they prepare for the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris. What seemed at first an unlikely scenario for a successful film turned out to be an absorbing drama of drive, dedication, honour and bigotry which, while chiming with the British national mood of the day, also struck an emotional, quasi-religious chord with American audiences.

Shot on a comparative shoestring budget, the film was the story of how two short-distance runners, Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), ambitious for success, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), ambitious for God, both won gold medals at the Paris Olympics. But it was really a personal attack on class and prejudice by Hudson, the Old Etonian director, whose family had been torn apart by what he considered to be the hypocritical standards of interwar Britain. His film was featured as the Royal Film Performance of 1981.

Produced by David Puttnam, and starring no one most people had heard of, Hudson’s period piece, once it had been garlanded with Academy Awards, became the highest-grossing import in the history of American cinema. As director, Hudson may have been a novice Oscar nominee, but only twice in the previous quarter of a century had Best Director and Best Picture been won by different films.

But the 1981 Oscar for Best Director went to Warren Beatty for Reds. When Puttnam went to the podium to accept the award for Best Picture, he called Hudson onstage to take a bow.

While Hollywood resounded to the battle cry of the film’s writer, Colin Welland: “The British are coming!” it turned out to be an ill-judged hostage to fortune. The last British film to win Best Picture had been Oliver! 13 years before, and although the following year Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi broke all British records with 11 Oscar nominations and eight wins, the momentum did not last.

Hudson’s career as a director of feature films never recovered after Revolution, his £16 million epic with an all-star cast led by Al Pacino. “This is one of the year’s worst big movies,” declared USA Today. “A chaotic two-hour four-minute mess,” agreed Time magazine.

Hudson’s problem was that his theme of US independence – a particularly American obsession – had, in Hollywood’s eyes, been hijacked by a British director, backed by British money, and even largely filmed in Britain. The Americans resented it. Nor had Tinseltown forgotten that warning from Welland, blurted out at the Oscar ceremony three years before. The panning of Revolution was Hudson’s punishment.

In the meantime Hudson had fallen out with David Puttnam, his producer on Chariots Of Fire and a one-time close friend. But after hearing something that someone apparently said at a party, Puttnam pulled out of Hudson’s follow-up film, Greystoke, and the rift was never healed. This film, too, while benevolently reviewed, caused Hudson much grief when Warner Bros insisted on so many cuts that he believed the film’s integrity had been fatally compromised.

Nor did his fourth film, Lost Angels, revive Hudson’s fortunes, the Daily Telegraph reviewer marking it down as “an absurd film of extremes”. Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys starred as a Californian teenager dumped into a young offenders’ institution by his mother, only to be befriended by an alcoholic psychoanalyst (Donald Sutherland). Once again a Hugh Hudson film was universally panned.

Hugh Donaldson-Hudson was born on August 25 1936 in London into a wealthy but dysfunctional family. His grandfather, Ralph Donaldson-Hudson, who as High Sheriff of Shropshire in the early 1920s was considered to be above reproach, had a scandalous affair with his son Michael’s first wife. The result was that the son, Hugh’s father, was disinherited, stripped of the family seat, Cheswardine Hall, and left practically bankrupt. Hugh was the child of his brief second marriage, and having taken work as a farm labourer, Michael died penniless aged 64. The shame instilled in Hugh a profound detestation of the British class system.

Packed off to boarding school aged six, he returned home in the holidays a budding filmmaker; when he was eight he shot a home movie on the family’s 8mm camera, rounding up the family for a drama about Cromwellian England.

Like three generations of his family before him, Hugh was educated at Eton, which he hated. Later in life, he told an interviewer that Eton had taught him “how to feel superior”, forgetting that the American incomprehension of irony is a national trait.

Unable to face university, he spent his National Service in the Tank Regiment in Germany and returned to live with his mother, the former Jacynth Ellerton, in Chelsea.

He started his career as head of the casting department of a London advertising agency, later moving to Paris, where he worked as a film editor. He formed his own company, Cammell-Hudson, and started making documentaries, the first being about egg boxes, shot at a cost of £800.

He won various prizes at advertising festivals and rejected a number of film offers before working as second unit director on his friend Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978).

Throughout the 1970s Hudson established himself as an outstanding maker of television commercials. In 1980 he worked on a particularly memorable one for the Fiat Strada car (“handmade by robots”), adding an electronic element to a chopped-down version of Figaro’s Largo Al Factotum aria from The Barber of Seville. The final version of the song was so popular that the advertising agency was urged to issue it as a record.

His breakthrough as a director had come with a moody evocation of the French Impressionists for a Dubonnet commercial. But Hudson’s first important job was a surreal intrigue, a £150,000 cinema commercial for Benson and Hedges, in which a helicopter drops a mysterious package into a swimming pool observed by iguanas. The pack turns into a sardine tin, and one of the iguanas into a frogman, who opens it to reveal the famous cigarettes.

Shooting in Phoenix, Arizona – “the only place we could be sure of sun” – Hudson and his crew arrived to find the city awash in torrential rain; they sat marooned in a motel for a week.

A one-time SDP supporter, Hudson defected in 1987 to direct the Labour Party’s most ambitious party political broadcast to date. Working for nothing, Hudson portrayed the then leader Neil Kinnock in “presidential” style, as a family man, a youthful and firm leader and slayer of the Left-wing Militant tendency.

With shots of Kinnock striding along cliff tops with his wife, Glenys, it was dubbed “Kinnock the Movie” and was so centred on Kinnock the man that the party was not mentioned at all.

Hudson had designed the sugar-coated film as a tear-jerking “weepie” aimed largely at women voters, and while one woman SDP activist confessed to getting through most of a box of paper tissues while watching it, another, a Conservative, found it “nauseating”.

Although in the event, the Tories under Margaret Thatcher were returned for a third term, Hudson was invited to make a second unavailing attempt to rehabilitate Labour in 1992. This time, after the Tories had recruited the director John Schlesinger to help with their campaign film, John Major was elected prime minister.

In 2008 Hudson recut Revolution, adding a new narration track by Al Pacino and releasing it on DVD as Revolution: Revisited. Both director and star insisted that the original had been rushed into cinemas incomplete.

In 2003 he had married the actress Maryam d’Abo; in 2007 she suffered a brain haemorrhage, and the following year they collaborated on a documentary, Rupture: Living With My Broken Brain. His final film as a director was Altamira, a drama about the discovery of Stone Age cave paintings.

Hugh Hudson married, in 1977, Susan Michie, an artist; they later divorced. They had a son, who survives him with Maryam d’Abo.

Hugh Hudson, born August 25 1936, died February 10 2023