Acclaimed Broadway, film and TV director Anthony Page dies at age 90
Published in Entertainment News
Tony-winning and Oscar-nominated director Anthony Page, whose projects ranged from “A Doll’s House” onstage to the big screen’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” has died.
He was 90.
His death on Sept. 11 at a London residential care home for veterans of the performing arts industry was confirmed to British news outlets by his press representative Jo Allan, Deadline reported Saturday.
Page became known first for his stage work in the 1950s and early 1960s as one of several directors who helped establish the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in London. He directed works by playwrights John Osborne, Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett, among many others who became household literary names.
The director debuted on Broadway in 1965’s “Inadmissible Evidence” by playwright John Osborne, starring Nicol Williamson. He would not return to Broadway until 1983, reviving George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” starring Philip Bosco, Rosemary Harris, Rex Harrison and Amy Irving, Deadline noted.
His Tony-winning turn came in 1997, after another yearslong absence, with his revival of “A Doll’s House.” That kicked off a series of star-studded productions throughout the late ’90s and 2000s that included “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, Ned Beatty and Margo Martindale, followed by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” by Albee, starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin.
Page developed particularly close working relationships with the works of Beckett and Albee and was instrumental in getting the theater industry hooked on Beckett, reviving “Waiting for Godot” first in Britain and then famously on Broadway in 2009 with Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman and John Glover, Playbill noted.
Other stars in his directorial orbit included Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Ian McKellan and Richard Burton. He was remembered by British producer Nica Burns as a “most delightful man with a towering intellect and an extraordinary ability with the text,” and by actor and playwright David Hare as “one of the pioneering theatre directors of his time,” according to Broadway World.
Page was also known for film and television work in Britain and the U.S., most notably for the Oscar-nominated 1977 “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” about a teen girl with mental illness. He also directed Cybill Chepherd, Elliott Gould and Angelea Lansbury in “The Lady Vanishes,” in 1979. For television there were “The Patricia Neal Story” and “Bill,” in 1981, and seven episodes of British miniseries “Middlemarch” in 1994.
Anthony Frederick Montague Page, born Sept. 21, 1935, leaves behind his husband and partner of 40 years, Kenneth Butler.
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