Michael Rudman, theatre director acclaimed for three productions of Death of a Salesman – obituary

Michael Rudman, who has died aged 84, was an American-born theatre director who spent most of his career in Britain, working on nearly every major stage in the country including the National Theatre, and establishing a reputation as a thorough professional who could be relied upon to attract top-line talent and big audiences.

Along the way Rudman, a tall “Texan Jew”, survived a foul-mouthed basting by Dustin Hoffman and the mockery of Rex Harrison, persuaded Harold Pinter to allow him to put on an all-black production of The Caretaker, and married, divorced and reunited with the actress Felicity Kendal.

He was, by common consent, extremely good company, and his gifts as an anecdotalist were apparent in a book of memoirs, I Joke Too Much (2014). The title was a quote from Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He directed the play in the 1960s at the Nottingham Playhouse, with John Neville as Loman; again at the National in 1979 with Warren Mitchell; and in a Tony-award winning production on Broadway in 1984 with Dustin Hoffman as Willy and John Malkovich as Biff.

The royalties he earned from the Broadway production paid for the house he and Felicity Kendal bought after their marriage, but as he recalled: “I earnt every penny.”

Two weeks into rehearsals, Hoffman tried to fire him. “During one rehearsal where our patience had been tried by a faulty set, Dustin responded to one of my minor directions by launching into a lengthy tirade. It went from ‘You’re trying to turn us into a bunch of f------ English actors. I’m not f------ John Gielgud’ to ‘You need therapy. Your sex life is a mess.’

“After six minutes he calmed down and apologised. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s a great play and brings out great emotions.’

“‘No,’ said Dustin. ‘I do this on s--- [ones], too.’ We all laughed and went back to work.”

“Most of us,” the Spectator reviewer observed, “would probably have just smacked the tantrum-prone little runt, but Rudman hung on doggedly and coaxed an amazing performance out of him.”

Earlier, it was Warren Mitchell who first discovered that Rudman was having an affair with Felicity Kendal. It began when Rudman was directing her in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray at the National. They had both been married before and decided to keep their affair under wraps. Rudman’s daughters, Amanda and Katy, who spent weekends with their father, were sworn to secrecy.

One day, however, Mitchell phoned him to tell him that his daughter Rebecca, who sometimes babysat for Rudman, had asked Katy if she had ever seen anyone famous naked. “ ‘Yes’, said Katy. ‘I can’t tell you who it is, but she’s the short one in The Good Life.”’

Michael Edward Rudman was born in Tyler, Texas, on February 14 1939, the younger of two sons of Mayer Billy Rudman and Josephine (née Davis). Mayer Rudman was a successful wildcatter, who, styling himself “Duke”, was known as much for his eccentricities, his exotic wardrobe and gift of the gab as for his business acumen.

He summered in Cannes, where, his son recalled, he struck up a friendship with an artist called Pablo Picasso who, during a boozy lunch at his villa, in return for Duke’s “charm of manner”, offered to give him any painting he liked on his walls. “There was, I always think,” Rudman wrote, “an awful silence. ‘They are quite valuable, or will be, one day,’ said the Spaniard with evident modesty.

“ ‘No thanks,’ said my dad.”

From Oberlin College, Ohio, Rudman went up to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he read English and was president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

He began his career in 1964 as an assistant director, and later associate producer, at the Nottingham Playhouse, then in 1970 he moved to Edinburgh as director of the Traverse Theatre, which, over three years, he rescued from bankruptcy with an energetic programme of West End names in new plays. Then, during his time as artistic director at Hampstead Theatre (1973-78), the theatre won the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Achievement.

In 1978 Rudman was invited to join the National Theatre by Sir Peter Hall and was director of the Lyttelton Theatre from 1979 to 1982, then associate director of the National until 1988.

In 1981 he staged an “integrated” version of Measure for Measure, which was boycotted by several critics in protest at the casting of the black actress Yvette Harris as Isabella. The production also drew protests from the Black Writers Co-operative, unhappy that black actors were being used to “add colour” rather than perform their own work.

Nothing daunted, Rudman went on to moot the idea of a black cast for The Caretaker with Harold Pinter, who was initially reluctant, wondering how well lines such as “the dirty blacks downstairs who foul up the lavatory” would go down. “But Harold,” Rudman protested. “We’re Jewish – we do it all the time... We lived in Texas, and my mother used to refer to ‘Oklahoma kikes’. Surely this is normal, for a certain group to denigrate the same people?”

When the play opened, however, only the Financial Times critic Michael Coveney seemed to get the point, describing the production as both “funny and shocking, in the way that some West Indians’ suspicion of Asians or some Jews’ anti-Semitism, rooted in a dislike of orthodoxy, is funny and shocking”.

In 1990, Rudman accepted the job of director of the Chichester Festival Theatre which he thought, would be “a piece of cake” after the National, only to find that it was more like “trying to push treacle up a flight of stairs... Within a year I was fired.”

From 1992 to 1994, he was artistic director of the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield.

Rudman freelanced on Broadway and in the West End, including, in 1988, directing the elderly and notoriously difficult Rex Harrison in The Admirable Crichton at the Haymarket Theatre.

“One day in rehearsal I was trying to get him to stand up at a particular point, but each time he questioned it. Then he started making fun of me: ‘I don’t understand these Canadian [sic] directors. So much bloody movement…What good does it do?... ’

“He was making the other actors laugh and it was getting out of hand. ‘Rex,’ I said. ‘I’ve directed 75 plays and some have movement in them.’ ‘I saw one of them,’ he said. There was quite a hush. ‘Oh?’ ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author.’ Pause. ‘At the National.’ Another pause. ‘It was bloody good.’

“And there it was. The charm, wit and ability to think on his feet. Everyone laughed, especially me,” Rudman wrote, before adding: “He didn’t fire me until after the show had opened successfully.”

In 1963 Rudman married Veronica Bennett, with whom he had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1981 and two years later he married Felicity Kendal, with whom he had a son. They divorced in 1990 and she went on to have an affair with Tom Stoppard. When that ended they reunited and remained together, though they never remarried.

Felicity Kendal survives him with his children.

Michael Rudman, born February 14 1939, died March 30 2023