Film director

Born: October 10, 1929;

Died: July 1, 2016

ROBIN Hardy, who has died aged 86, effectively made a career out of a single film. The Wicker Man was his directorial debut, it shot on location in various parts of Scotland in 1972, it was released as the bottom half of a double-bill two years later and it looked set for obscurity before gradually building a cult reputation and eventually being recognised as a classic.

It was a strikingly original mix of horror, thriller, musical and folklore, famously ending with Edward Woodward as a human sacrifice imprisoned inside the giant wicker man, with the locals singing jolly folk songs as he goes up in flames.

Woodward played a rather stuffy, very religious policeman who flies to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. He finds a strange, pagan community, presided over by laird Christopher Lee, and is shocked by their loose moral and sexual standards.

As the film’s following grew, it was re-cut and re-packaged on DVD, it was the subject of several books and it inspired a festival in the South-West of Scotland, where much of it was shot. A remake with Nicolas Cage and an American setting ten years ago only enhanced the reputation of the original. It was even the subject of an academic conference.

The critical reassessment was encouraged and to some extent engineered by Hardy, who wrote a novelisaton of the story a few years after its initial release and was involved in the search for lost footage and in the release of various “new” versions.

He worked on screenplays for other films that explored similar themes, which he kept insisting were not sequels, although when one finally went into production in 2009, again using Scottish locations, it was under the title The Wicker Tree. This time round the film did pretty much disappear without trace.

A charming and urbane man, who always looked dapper in a suit and tie or cravat, Hardy loved to talk about The Wicker Man and as recently as May went to Malta for a masterclass and screening of the film

Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1929, Robin St Clair Hardy studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and worked in television and theatre in the US and Canada. Back in London he formed a company with Anthony Shaffer, making television commercials, with Shaffer as writer and Hardy as director.

Encouraged by his twin brother Peter’s success as a playwright, Anthony quit the commercials business to concentrate on writing plays and films. He wrote the play Sleuth (1970), subsequently filmed with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, and scripted Frenzy (1972) for Alfred Hitchcock.

According to Hardy, Shaffer and he had “a long series of conversations over a number of years about doing a film which was a kind of an anti-horror film, a film that was frightening without using all the conventional, cliched pentagrams and garlic and stakes-through-hearts.” Hardy claimed he wrote the initial story for The Wicker Man, which Shaffer turned into a screenplay.

However Shaffer maintained it was his idea and that he recruited Hardy as director, because of their previous work together. Shaffer has sole credit as writer on the film. The later novelisation is credited to both men.

The fact that The Wicker Man did not fall conveniently into any one genre made it a challenge to market and it fell victim to internal changes at British Lion, leading to it being cut and released on a double bill with Don’t Look Now. As early as 1977 Cinefantastique magazine dubbed it “the Citizen Kane of horror”.

Hardy wrote several novels, including The Education of Don Juan (1980), but it would be another decade before he made another film. He wrote and directed the thriller The Fantasist (1986) and he wrote and produced Forbidden Sun (1989), a thriller that managed to mix gymnastics, rape and Cretan legend.

The Wicker Man’s critical reassessment gathered momentum in 1988 after the BBC showed it as part of Alex Cox’s Moviedrome series of cult movies. It reached a new audience, which was impressed by its originality and fascinated by the stories around it.

A whole mythology developed around the film, including suggestions that the original negative had been buried in the foundations of the M3 or alternatively that Rod Stewart wanted to buy it and destroy it to stop people seeing his girlfriend Britt Ekland’s bare bottom, even though it was not her bottom, but that of a body double.

Hardy developed his ideas for a companion piece, once more set in Scotland, with two young American missionaries in place of Woodward’s uptight policeman, but he struggled to raise finance. He turned the story into a novel, published as Cowboys for Christ in 2006. It was filmed as The Wicker Tree in 2009.

Hardy had a colourful and complicated personal life. He is survived by his fifth wife Victoria Webster and by eight children in various parts of the world.

BRIAN PENDREIGH