It’s been announced that Ronald Neame, best known as the director of the classic disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure, died in hospital in LA. He was 99 years old. The British born filmmaker had movie in his blood, as his mother was an actress and his father a director. He started his career in 1920s, when his father died and his family needed the money, with one of his early job working as an assistant cameraman on Hitchcock’s Blackmail.
In the early 30s he became a cinematographer, then in the 1940s showed his versatility by producing and helping to adapt the likes of This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter and Great Expectations for the big screen (all of which were directed by David Lean), scoring Best Screenplay Oscar nominations for the latter two.
In the late 1940s he became a director himself, making the likes of The Million Pound Note before the movie world really took notice in the 1960s with the likes of the Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine movie Gambit, and the Oscar winning classic The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. After directing the Albert Finney starring musical version of Scrooge in 1970, he was hired for the film for which he would forever be associated with – The Poseidon Adventure.
He never matched that success again, despite movies like The Odessa File and a return to disaster territory with Meteor in 1979. He made a few more films in the 1980s, bowing out with a short called The Magic Balloon in 1990. Neame was awarded a CBE in 1996, and published his autobiography, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, in 2003.
Ronald Neame – April 23rd, 1911-June 16th – RIP