Director of Logan's Run and The Dam Busters

Born: January 30, 1920;

Died: April 25, 2018

MICHAEL Anderson, who has died aged 98, was a British film director whose career stretched over exactly five decades, with his first as a director arriving in 1949 and his last in 1999.

Most prolific in the decades immediately following the Second World War, he worked on war films but was also prolific in the thriller and drama genres. To illustrate the diversity of his work, the most well-remembered of his movies were the classic war film The Dam Busters (1955), the multiple academy award-winning 1956 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, and the kitsch but gritty 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, which imagined a future in which adults are euthanised at the age of 30.

The most successful film of 1955 at the UK box office, The Dam Busters told the true story of engineer Barnes Wallis’s attempts to create a ‘bouncing’ bomb which would effectively destroy the dam infrastructure of Nazi Germany, and the stories of the RAF pilots – led by ‘Bomber’ Harris - who attempted to test the devices in combat. Starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd, it was a fine example of the ‘men on a mission’ sub-genre of war films, and its future influence included George Lucas’ climactic Death Star bombing sequence in Star Wars.

Following a moderately well-received adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 (1956) – which was reshot for America with a ‘happier’ ending – the next film Anderson directed in his mid-50s golden period was Around the World in 80 Days, which starred the Mexican actor Cantinflas, David Niven and Shirley Maclaine, and included cameos for Noel Coward, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton and Marlene Dietrich. Its five Academy Award wins included Best Picture, while Anderson was nominated for Best Director. Although he was never to hit such heights again in his career, Anderson continued to work steadily and on high-profile pictures with grit and merit, first from the UK and then from Canada after emigrating there in the early 1970s.

His subsequent films included the naval war movie Yangtse Incident: The Story of HMS Amethyst (1957), a kind of seabound Dam Busters; the James Cagney-starring, Ireland-set IRA thriller Shake Hands with the Devil (1959); The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), starring Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston, a directorial job he took on when Alfred Hitchcock passed it over; the Marlon Brando-produced The Naked Edge (1961); and the all-star, Harold Pinter-written spy thriller The Quiller Memorandum (1966).

Born in London in 1920, Anderson’s parents Lawrence and Beatrice were both actors, and he acted himself in two films – Housemaster (1938) and Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942) – while working as a runner and assistant director at Elstree Studios. While serving with the royal Signal Corps during the Second World War he met and befriended Peter Ustinov, subsequently serving as assistant director on his films before the pair shared the directing credit on Anderson’s debut Private Angelo (1949).

Following his move to Canada and the success of Logan’s Run, Anderson’s career moved into low-budget movies and television dramas, culminating in the 1999 film The New Adventures of Pinocchio. Married three times, he is survived by six children and two stepchildren, including the actor Laurie Holden.

DAVID POLLOCK