The film director and producer Geoffrey Reeve, who has died aged 77, contributed polished examples of mainstream British cinema in a variety of forms over several decades.
He was born in Tring, Hertfordshire, the son of a compositor who would cycle each day to the printworks in nearby King's Langley. A bright pupil at the local primary, Reeve won a county council scholarship to Berkhamsted school where he excelled in sports, academic subjects and school plays. He was also a notable chorister, an experience he would put to good use for the subplot of the film Shadow Run 50 years later.
After national service with the 7th Royal Tank Regiment in Hong Kong, he went to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1953 to read law. His singing voice and his gift for comic acting made him a useful addition to Oxford's drama and revue companies, and he was apparently set on a theatrical career until parental disapproval intervened.
After his marriage to Gina Gurney in 1956, Reeve left for Canada and a job with ICI, making promotional films for the company. On his return to the UK, he made TV commercials. He joined the writer/producer/director Carl Foreman's Open Road Films as an associate producer, and it was while he was investigating the film rights to several Daphne du Maurier books that he met the thriller writer Alistair MacLean. MacLean had bought Jamaica Inn, the coaching house on the borders of Bodmin Moor that Du Maurier immortalised in her 1936 novel.
MacLean supplied the screenplay for Reeve's directorial debut, Puppet On a Chain (1971), based on a MacLean novel and involving drug smuggling in the Netherlands. At a difficult time for British cinema, thrillers were safe bets, and Caravan to Vaccares (1974), based on another MacLean novel, was in a similar vein. An Anglo-French project co-produced by Reeve, it starred Charlotte Rampling and revolved around skulduggery in the Camargue, with a climax in a bullring.
In 1984, Reeve was producer of the successful TV miniseries The Far Pavilions, a melodrama based on MM Kaye's novel about 19th-century India, with a cast including Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, John Gielgud and Rupert Everett. The following year saw the release of The Shooting Party, which took place in 1913 on a Derbyshire estate and sought to offer an elegiac portrait of an England about to be swept away by the first world war. It offered a deeply felt central performance by James Mason, who died shortly after the film's completion. Gielgud was again in the cast, as were Dorothy Tutin and Edward Fox.
As a producer, Reeve's subsequent films dealt with aspects of contemporary life, and he began a long collaboration with Michael Caine. Half Moon Street (1987), based on Paul Theroux's novel Doctor Slaughter, ventured into the demimonde where sex and politics overlap, and managed in the process to achieve wit rather than prurience.
The Whistle Blower (also 1987) was an exploration of harder-edged thriller territory, tapping into topical fears about rogue elements in the security services and traitors in high places. Gielgud appears as the aristocratic "mole"
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