Obituary: Bill Hays
The stage and television director, Bill Hays, who has died in France aged 67, was one of the brightest, most versatile and certainly most cavalier of the generation to emerge in the 1960s and 70s. Indeed, on closer examination he was much more of a renaissance man than even his closest friends and associates, myself included, realised.
A miner's son, he was born in the pit village of Wingate, County Durham, before his family moved to Nuneaton, Warwickshire, in the early years of the second world war, when his father got work in a local factory. His first major encounter with show business was as a student at the Royal Ballet school - a Billy Elliott before his time - and he appeared as a mouse in the British premiere of Cinderella with Moira Shearer in 1948.
He grew too tall to remain a dancer, but was apparently the right size and shape to play rugby union for England schools, a sporting prowess which did him no harm during national service. He was fast-tracked through the ranks, and was mentioned in dispatches following action in Aden.
After art school in Birmingham, early adventures with Living Theatre in Leicester and with Warwickshire cricket club - he was coached by the great Eric Hollies in the art of leg-spin bowling - Bill was trawled into television in 1964, when the launch of BBC2 necessitated a rapid recruitment and training programme for directors. Again, he zoomed through the ranks, and his early credits included Z Cars (then transmitted live) and countless single plays. He somehow juggled his television commitments with theatre work, and it was after the last night of his 1967 production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage, at the Jesmond Playhouse, Newcastle upon Tyne, that the idea of a north-east equivalent of Behan's exuberant masterpiece was born.
Bill organised a meeting of pitman-turned-writer Sid Chaplin, songwriter Alex Glasgow and myself - all native sons of County Durham - in Sid's front room, and together we made the musical Close the Coalhouse Door, which opened triumphantly in Newcastle in April 1968. Later that year, it reached London's West End, where it played to rave reviews and minute audiences at the Fortune Theatre - or "the graveyard of champions", as we christened it.
Partly on the back of this, Bill was appointed artistic director of the Leeds Playhouse, when it opened in 1970, and he asked Alex and me to write the opening show. We delivered a slab of in-your-face agitprop called Simon Says, which remains the major catastrophe on my CV - "like spending a couple of hours in a refrigerated meat warehouse", I later reported. I still remember the names of the four people who liked it.
Characteristically, Bill remained totally loyal and unrepentant. He saw it as his duty to take risks, and if they ended in tears before bedtime and angry letters in the local paper, that proved he was doing his job properly. It was almost as if he liked it better that way.
To be sure, his period at the Playhouse had its triumphs - from Pirandello to Osborne to Barry Collins - along with a redemptive revival of Coalhouse Door, embracing the then Conservative prime minister Edward Heath and the three-day week; I even did some rewrites by candlelight during a power cut. But in 1972, Bill, a man never totally at ease with anything resembling a committee, left the Playhouse to return to the freelance world, where he belonged.
His range of skills - visual, musical and dramatic - are reflected in his television credits: severely edited highlights included the play Orde Wingate (1976), for which he created a desert in the studio, The Gondoliers (1972), Rumpole of the Bailey (1978), Oresteia (1979), Quartermaine's Terms (1987) and A Month in the Country (1984). In Rock Follies (1977), he achieved some of the most spectacular visual effects ever produced in a television studio: "Basically, we just twiddled all the knobs to see what would happen. God knows whether they'll ever work again."
Gregarious, charming and irritatingly handsome, Bill had an attitude to work characteristic of the period; rehearsals started early but were carefully planned to harmonise with licensing hours. This was not, however, an approach that sat easily with the management strategies that invaded the television industry of the 1990s, and although he directed episodes of soaps, disenchantment set in. Thus, in 1995, Bill and his second wife, Catherine Schell, moved to France and converted Maison Valentin, a broken-down auberge in the Auvergne - first spotted when he was directing episodes of the second world war series Wish Me Luck - into a splendid bed-and-breakfast.
It is an idyllic spot, set in woodland where wild mushrooms grow and, naturally, handy for the vineyards. Bill and Catherine played host to a steadily growing number of loyal and loving visitors, until his health problems began to limit his role. But the spirit endured, and even when physically incapacitated he continued to send his drawings, generally of snails getting up to mischief, to friends around the world.
He will be remembered by a vast extended family of actors, writers, designers and musicians as a man with energy to burn and possibly too many talents for our specialist times - a renaissance man who maybe deserved a better renaissance than the one that turned up in the 1980s and 90s.
· He is survived by Catherine, and by his children Daniel and Joanna, and their mother, Jill. William 'Bill' Hays, theatre and television director, born March 15 1938; died March 2 2006