John Irvin obituary

Bouncing from war zone reportage to cold war espionage, Hollywood horror to Sherwood Forest swashbuckler, Harold Pinter to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the director John Irvin, who has died aged 86, was nothing if not eclectic.

“I’m a bit split,” he said. “I like playing with expensive toys, yet I also like the miniatures. I hate being pigeonholed, and I like to do the unexpected.”

He enjoyed his greatest success with the BBC mini-series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), adapted from John le Carré’s novel about the intelligence officer George Smiley’s efforts to winkle out a Russian mole. Smiley was played with clenched elegance and economy by the formidable Alec Guinness, who took to striking out lines in the script whenever he felt he could convey the necessary information by expression alone.

“I was terrified, knowing I had to spend a year with him,” Irvin told Guinness’s biographer Piers Paul Read. On the first day of rehearsals, the director offered a suggestion that was rejected out of hand. After persuading Guinness to try the scene his way, Irvin was vindicated. “Very good, John,” the actor said. “Ten out of ten.”

There was still Guinness’s trepidation to contend with. Phoning Irvin at 3am once shooting was under way, the actor fretted that he “hadn’t found Smiley” and recommended that the part be recast. On set a few hours later, Guinness walked off in the middle of filming. Irvin brought him back and stood his ground. “We’re going to do it in one take,” he said of the day’s first scene. “Do you understand?”

When Guinness was later asked what he liked about Irvin’s directing style, he said: “Balls behind the camera.”

Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1979. Photograph: Maximum Film/Alamy

The series, described by its producer Jonathan Powell as “a sort of elegy for empire”, was seen at its peak by more than 8 million viewers (more than 15% of the UK population) and won several prizes, including best drama series in the Broadcasting Press Guild awards.

Interviewing the director in 1986 for Films in Review, Louise Tanner wrote: “There is about Irvin just a hint of a Le Carré hero, the crisp diction, the quiet air of knowing his way around the lands east of Suez.”

Irvin was unavailable to direct the follow-up, Smiley’s People, having been courted by Hollywood since before Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His 1977 Granada Television adaptation of Dickens’ Hard Times had impressed executives there.

From moles, he moved on to dogs: The Dogs of War (1980), that is, adapted from Frederick Forsyth’s novel and starring Christopher Walken as a mercenary helping to overthrow a west African dictator. Stark and uncompromising, the film was hated by Forsyth.

Apparitions were next. Ghost Story (1981) featured an illustrious cast who were famous before Irvin was even born: Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman and Douglas Fairbanks Jr played friends harbouring a nasty secret. The New England winter was scarier than any of the film’s spectres, Irvin recalled. “When I finished the last shot, I said to Fred, ‘It’s all over. You can go home to Beverly Hills.’” Astaire replied: “Oh John, I’m so happy. I thought I was going to go home in a box.”

Horses followed in Champions (1984), the story of the cancer-stricken jockey Bob Champion (John Hurt), then reptiles in Turtle Diary (1985), a low-key comedy adapted by Pinter from Russell Hoban’s novel, with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley as shy naturalists who plot to liberate giant sea turtles. Irvin compared working with that cast to “driving a Ford Mustang and trading up to a Ferrari”.

In directing Schwarzenegger in Raw Deal (1986), he might be said to have swapped the sports car for a bulldozer. One of the Austrian action hero’s interchangeable shoot-’em-up thrillers, the film cast him as an ex-FBI agent infiltrating the Chicago mob. Even Irvin admitted the movie was “not dealing with the great mysteries of life”.

He had hoped for many years to direct a film about Vietnam, where he spent time while making a BBC Omnibus documentary about war photographers. (He had even been shot at on the Laotian border.) When he was offered Hamburger Hill (1987), which focused on the real-life 10-day battle to capture Dong Ap Bia in the A Shau Valley in 1969, it satisfied that desire.

John Irvin on the set of Hamburger Hill in the Philippine jungle south of Manila, 1986. Photograph: Alex Bowie/Getty Images

Irvin succeeded in his aim of “[getting] as close as possible to the experience of combat without thrills or moralising. I wanted the audience to be there.”

Unfortunately, the audience was fatigued. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) dominated the Oscars before Hamburger Hill had even been released, while Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) pipped Irvin’s film to the post in the US. He claimed in 2021 that Kubrick had been toying with a later release date until he was secretly shown a print of Hamburger Hill by a colour grader working on both movies.

Nevertheless, the critic Pauline Kael considered it to be superior to both Stone and Kubrick’s films. Irvin, she wrote, “has the pride of a director who knows what he’s doing”.

John and his twin brother, David, were born in Wallasey – now Merseyside but then part of Cheshire – to Elsie (nee Bending) and Charles Irvin, a mechanical engineer. After the family moved to South Shields in Tyne and Wear, the brothers were educated at Durham school.

Film bewitched John from an early age. “When I was a child, I used to organise my gangs into film units. I was brought up near Newcastle in the same town as Ridley Scott – there must be something about the smell of the fish queues that produces film directors.”

He enrolled at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School), which was then housed above a butcher’s shop in Brixton, south London. Irvin said his mother cried for two days when she learned that he would not, as she had hoped, be pursuing a career as an architect.

After working as an apprentice editor at Rank, he received a British Film Institute grant to make Gala Day (1963), a documentary about the Durham miners’ gala, which was then bought by the BBC. Irvin made other documentaries for the corporation as well as for his own company, Mithras Films, which he formed in 1962 with Maurice Hatton.

These included The 26 (1966), about ex-miners who participated in the General Strike of 1926, and the Bafta-nominated Mafia No! (1967), which documented a protest march across western Sicily against organised crime. While making a film about the civil war in Yemen, Irvin lived with Bedouin tribespeople for four months. He was also a film adviser to the Jamaican government in 1963-64.

By the end of the 1960s, his experiences convinced him to leave the documentary world behind. “I reached the point in Vietnam where I had simply seen too much suffering.”

Irvin during a photocall at the 2008 Rome international film festival. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/ AFP/Getty Images

He worked in British television throughout the next decade on series including the political drama The Nearly Man (1974-75), one of several collaborations with the writer Arthur Hopcraft, who went on to adapt Hard Times and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Irvin’s later movies included Next of Kin (1989), starring Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson as Appalachian brothers out for revenge. Just as Hamburger Hill got lost amid other Vietnam movies, so his Robin Hood (1991), with Patrick Bergin in the title role and Uma Thurman as Maid Marian, was overshadowed by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which starred Kevin Costner and opened a month later to far greater fanfare.

The Hells Angels provided unlikely inspiration for Irvin’s earthy take. “Robin and his men must have terrorised Nottingham like a motorbike gang,” he said. There wasn’t much the director could do, however, when Bergin fell ill, forcing the production to rely on stand-ins. “We had to hide the problem from the studio,” Irvin said, “because otherwise they would have stopped the production.”

He continued to demonstrate his versatility. The chocolate-box prettiness of Widows’ Peak (1994), a whimsical comic mystery starring Joan Plowright and Mia Farrow, and his adaptation of HE Bates’s A Month By the Lake (1995), with Thurman and Vanessa Redgrave, were followed by the hard-nosed thrillers City of Industry (1997), starring Harvey Keitel, and Shiner (2000), with Michael Caine and Martin Landau as rival boxing promoters. He also returned to combat in the TV movie When Trumpets Fade (1998), set during the dying days of the second world war. Mandela’s Gun (2016) dramatised Nelson Mandela’s stint as a guerrilla fighter for the ANC.

Irvin filming Mandela’s Gun (2016). Photograph: Mandela’s Gun

At the time of his death, Irvin was working on Water from an Ancient Well, a documentary about his friend the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim, who died in June.

“To me, being a director is the most privileged existence there is,” said Irvin. “It’s bloody hard work, but when it’s going well, it’s like having the best table in the restaurant.”

He is survived by Emilie, Luke and Amy, the children from his marriage to Sophie (nee Litchfield), who died in 1991, and by two grandchildren, Finn and Isla.