Christopher Thomas MorahanCBE (9 July 1929 – 7 April 2017) was a British stage and television director and production executive.
Biography
Early life and career
Morahan was born on 9 July 1929 in London, the son of film production designer Tom Morahan (1906-1969) and his wife, Nancy Charlotte Barker (1904-1977), an artist.[1][2]
He was educated at Highgate School followed by his national service. Originally thinking about a career as an architect, he realised it would be some years before he could earn a living and thus settled on working in the film industry. The director Thorold Dickinson advised him to learn about acting and the theatrical repertoire instead.[2] He trained for the stage at the Old Vic Theatre School from 1947 with actor/director Michel Saint-Denis, designer Margaret Harris, and director George Devine.
Initially an actor, he briefly worked as a stage manager on Orson Welles' touring production of Othello, but refused to work on Welles' next production and found the theatre of the time unenthusing.[2] In a career change of sorts, he joined ATV as a floor manager and, subsequently became a television director from 1957, on Emergency Ward 10,[1] a new ITV series.
From 1972 to 1976, he was the Head of Plays for BBC Television, a department responsible for such series as Play for Today and Play of the Month. In this role he commissioned Days of Hope (1975), a four-part serial written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach which covers proletarian life from 1916 to 1926.[1] He managed to appoint Roy Battersby as the director of Colin Welland's Leeds United (1974) despite negative vetting from MI5 which rejected Battersby because of his membership of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. While working for the BBC, Peter Nichols was another dramatist with whom Morahan had a successful partnership, but another project with John Hopkins, the six-part play cycle Fathers and Families (1977), was a major disappointment.[2]
Morahan's first wife was Joan Lucie Murray (d. 1973), with whom he had two sons, including director Andy Morahan; a daughter from the marriage predeceased him.[1][4] After his first wife died, Morahan married actress Anna Carteret; the couple have two daughters: theatre director Rebecca,[5] also involved in human rights activism,[2] and actress Hattie Morahan.[6]