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Piers Haggard, director of theatre, film and TV who ranged from lurid horror to Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven – obituary

Haggard with his OBE at Buckingham Palace, March 2016 - Dominic Lipinski/WPA Pool/Getty Images
Haggard with his OBE at Buckingham Palace, March 2016 - Dominic Lipinski/WPA Pool/Getty Images

Piers Haggard, who has died aged 83, was a director whose work shone most brightly on screen in Pennies from Heaven, the television masterpiece described by its writer, Dennis Potter, as “drama with music”.

Set in the 1930s, the Bafta-winning serial starred Bob Hoskins as a travelling sheet-music seller who cheats on his wife and switches from everyday “reality” to daydreaming sequences of musical fantasy in which characters lip-sync to popular songs of the era.

Haggard felt that the everyday scenes should be shot in black and white and the fantasy ones in colour, but Potter was adamant that everything should be in colour. The director took this on board, enjoying the “dizzy delight” of collaborating with Ken Westbury and Dave Sydenham (responsible for photographing the fantasy sequences) to produce a dreamlike quality.

Kenith Trodd, who produced Pennies from Heaven, had spotted Haggard’s talents when he directed a 1976 BBC version of the scriptural Chester Mystery Plays.

Filmed in colour: Pennies from Heaven - Alamy
Filmed in colour: Pennies from Heaven - Alamy

For Chester Mystery Cycle, he used pioneering blue-screen techniques to, as he explained it, “recapture the fantasy, fairytale quality of the plays”. But he was keen to point out that it was not “arty”. (Blue screen was later overtaken by green screen.)

Earlier, Haggard directed the 1971 horror film The Blood on Satan’s Claw, although he claimed to have no interest in the genre, saying that his theatre background made him “frightfully serious”.

The movie is remembered for a 17-year-old Linda Hayden as the sexually aware leader of a group of young Devil-worshippers and the screams of Wendy Padbury as one of her followers ritualistically raped and killed in a church ruin.

Haggard said he adopted a “painterly” style for location filming in an Oxfordshire village, using low camera angles and shooting actors on high landscapes against open skies.

Although the film failed to make much of a stir at the time, it became a cult classic, with some critics placing it alongside two other chillers of the era, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, in an “unholy trinity” of what Haggard dubbed “folk horror”.

He returned to horror 10 years later with Venom, which fared less well. The director recalled that the two stars, Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed, “fought like cats” off camera.

In a different genre, one he enthused about, Haggard had the distinction of directing the 1979 TV serial Quatermass, the fourth and final production of Nigel Kneale’s science-fiction adventures.

But, with John Mills perhaps miscast as the now retired professor searching for his granddaughter, it never had the impact of Kneale’s previous screen outings, nor did a re-cut version titled The Quatermass Conclusion, made for cinemas abroad.

John Mills in Quatermass - EUSTON FILMS/THAMES TELEVISION/alamy
John Mills in Quatermass - EUSTON FILMS/THAMES TELEVISION/alamy

Piers Inigo Haggard was born on March 18 1939 in London to the actor Stephen Haggard and his wife, Morna Gillespie, an assistant stage manager. Henry Rider Haggard, author of adventure novels such as King Solomon’s Mines, was his great-great-uncle.

When Piers was one he, his mother and his older brother Paul were evacuated from wartime London to the US, where his paternal grandfather was the British consul-general in New York. Following Paul’s death from diphtheria, he and his mother returned to Britain, where his younger brother, Mark, was born.

His father, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, was posted to Egypt, where he had a relationship with another woman and committed suicide in 1943 after she broke it off. Three years later, Piers’s mother married Richard Elmhirst and the family moved to Scotland to run Muckhart Mill Farm in Clackmannanshire.

On leaving Dollar Academy, Haggard studied English at Edinburgh University (1956-60), where he acted and directed with the dramatic society, which staged plays at the Edinburgh Festival. He was also involved in talks that led to the establishment of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society in 1958.

Linda Hayden in The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) - Alamy
Linda Hayden in The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) - Alamy

He began his professional career at the Royal Court Theatre in London as assistant to its artistic director, George Devine, before directing plays at Dundee Rep (1961-62) and Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre (1962-63).

After moving to the National Theatre company at the Old Vic in London in 1963 he was assistant director to Laurence Olivier for Uncle Vanya (1963-64) and Franco Zeffirelli for Much Ado About Nothing (1965).

Haggard moved into television with the BBC in 1965. He gained early screen experience with Thirty-Minute Theatre plays (1965-66) and episodes in 1966 of the soap opera The Newcomers, and was soon working across the BBC and ITV. A talented linguist, he also assisted the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni on the set of the classic Swinging Sixties film Blow-Up (1966) by translating his instructions to the cast.

With the actress Stephanie Stumph working on The Shell Seekers (Die Muschelsucher), an Anglo-German mini-series first broadcast on the ZDF channel (2006) - Peter Bischoff/Getty Images
With the actress Stephanie Stumph working on The Shell Seekers (Die Muschelsucher), an Anglo-German mini-series first broadcast on the ZDF channel (2006) - Peter Bischoff/Getty Images

Haggard’s first film as a director was Wedding Night (1969), starring Dennis Waterman and Tessa Wyatt in a story about sexual repression in Ireland.

Later, he directed The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980) shortly before the death of its star, Peter Sellers. Two directors had been fired before filming began, and after Haggard clashed with Sellers, he too was fired and the actor directed the end of the shoot himself.

Haggard’s other notable television work included “No Trams to Lime Street”, a 1970 Wednesday Play by Alun Owen, the 1986 series John Silver’s Return to Treasure Island, starring Brian Blessed, and two Jack Rosenthal plays, Eskimo Day (1996) and Cold Enough for Snow (1997).

Haggard was a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain in 1982, as well as the Directors’ and Producers’ Rights Society five years later, overseeing its transformation into Directors UK in 1992. He also formed Stage Directors UK in 2015.

For decades, he campaigned for directors’ creative and economic rights, and was appointed OBE in 2016. “I seem unable to resist going into battle for what I see as the reasonable rights of my fellow directors,” he said.

Haggard’s 1960 marriage to Christiane Stokes ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Anna (née Sklovsky), a stained-glass artist, their son and daughter – actress Daisy Haggard – and the three daughters and son of his first marriage.

Piers Haggard, born March 18 1939, died January 11 2023