POWELL, Tristram Roger Dymoke (1940-2024)
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Tristram Powell, brilliant director who flourished in the golden age of BBC arts coverage – obituary
He made films with Alan Bennett, Philip Roth and Michael Palin, secured a rare interview with Marcel Duchamp and was painted by Lucian Freud
Tristram Powell, who has died aged 83, was a film, television and occasional stage director who became a great favourite with artists and writers during the heyday of BBC Television arts documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Moving on from such series as Omnibus and Arena, he collaborated with leading writers on television and radio dramas and demonstrated a gift for suspense, directing episodes of such series as Law and Order, Foyle’s War, Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution, Judge John Deed and Kavanagh QC.
The elder of two sons of the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time, and his wife Lady Violet, née Pakenham, daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, Tristram had a cultured and literary upbringing which gave him an unusually sympathetic understanding of how creative people think and work…..
Tristram Roger Dymoke Powell was born in Oxford on April 25 1940 and brought up in Regent’s Park, London, after a short period of being evacuated as a baby to Dunstall Priory in Kent, home of his “Uncle Eddie”, the writer and dramatist Lord Dunsany. In 1952, when Tristram was 12, the family moved to The Chantry, a country home near Frome in Somerset…..
In 1968 he married the artist Virginia Lucas, with whom he had a son, Archie, a documentary film-maker, and a daughter, Georgia, now the Duchess of Beaufort. They survive him with four grandchildren.
Tristram Powell, born April 25 1940, died March 1 2024
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 17 May 2024:
E X T R A C T
Tristram Powell obituary: TV director who excelled at drama and arts documentaries
The son of the novelist Anthony Powell, he forged a career collaborating with the likes of Alan Bennett and Michael Palin
of Alan Bennett and Michael Palin
Tristram Powell inherited the curiosity about people that marked his father, the novelist Anthony Powell. His natural warmth came from his mother, Violet Pakenham. The combination enabled him to become a particularly skilled and versatile director, notably of arts documentaries for television.
… Tristram Roger Dymoke Powell was born in Oxford in 1940, the elder of two sons. His father, known for his 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), was then stationed in Belfast. When Powell and his mother, Lady Violet, a daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, arrived in the city, his father had neglected to find lodgings for them. For a while they shared those of the future Liberal leader Jo Grimond.
During his childhood in Regent’s Park, London, and Frome, Somerset, Powell regularly encountered writers such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene and George Orwell, whose wake in 1950 was held at the Powells’ house.
His cousin, Lady Antonia Fraser, lived with them for a time as a teenager. With his mother — “the right arm,” he recalled, “of my father’s imagination” — they would visit art galleries. Another mentor was VS Naipaul, from whom Powell eventually bought his house. He could remember swimming with Ernest Hemingway…
… He married Virginia Lucas, an artist, in 1968. She survives him with their daughter, Georgia, formerly a newspaper obituary writer and now Duchess of Beaufort, and their son, Archie, a film-maker…
…Powell, who was no kind of snob, intellectual or otherwise, nor a self-conscious revolutionary. More accurate was the verdict in 1973 of The Times that he was a “deceptively gentle film-maker whose grasp of thematic essentials is unemphatic because it is so firm and whose memory for the suggestive image is usually sharp, and sometimes unforgettable”.
Tristram Powell, director, was born on April 25, 1940. He died of leukaemia on March 1, 2024, aged 83
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tristram-powell-obituary-tv-director-work-alan-bennett-8rg752bch