BILLINGTON, Kevin (1934-2021)

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Dec 17, 2021, 4:33:01 PM12/17/21

to Peerage News

The film and TV director, Kevin Billington has died. He m 1967 the author Lady Rachel Mary Pakenham OBE dau of the 7th Earl of Longford KG PC.

Obit in the Daily Telegraph 17 December 2021 - Kevin Billington, director who made his mark with radical documentaries in the 1960s and later with polished BBC adaptations and theatre – obituary (telegraph.co.uk)

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Kevin Billington, director who made his mark with radical documentaries in the 1960s and later with polished BBC adaptations and theatre – obituary

He worked in the theatre with Harold Pinter: their wives were sisters, the historian Antonia Fraser and the novelist Rachel Billington

Kevin Billington was born on June 12 1934 and grew up with his younger sister in a two-up, two-down Catholic home in Warrington. His father, Richard, was a factory worker with British Aluminium, while his mother, Margaret, came from a large, originally Irish, clan. In what he regarded as a turning point in his life, at 13 he won a scholarship through his father’s company to go to Bryanston, a public school in Dorset, where he excelled in the classroom and the sports field in rugby and cricket....

Longer projects followed, including Matador, about the Spanish bull-fighter, El Cordobés, which won the 1966 Bafta for Best Documentary, and Twilight of Empire (1964), made in India with the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. It was Muggeridge who claimed the credit for introducing the happy couple when in 1967 Billington married Lady Rachel Pakenham, daughter of the prison reform campaigner (and Muggeridge’s friend and neighbour) Lord Longford, at that time the Leader of the House of Lords, where the reception took place.

The couple had met in New York, where she was working as a researcher with ABC Television and Billington was completing what turned out to be his final documentary, Madison Avenue, USA, a look at the “mad men” of the advertising industry....

The Catholicism of his childhood, which he shared with his wife, remained an important part of his make-up throughout his life. It gave him comfort when their oldest son, Nat, a successful tech entrepreneur with two young children, died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 44.

Though not by nature a joiner of councils and commissions, Kevin Billington served in various roles at Bafta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including two years as chairman. When directing roles became fewer, he refocused the energy and curiosity that he retained until near the end into another great passion, classical music, studying for a degree in a subject dear to his heart, Beethoven.

He is survived by his wife and three surviving children, Rose, Chloe and Caspar.