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Early life and careerBorn in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), he initially studied to become an architect, before he changed career paths and enrolled to study drama at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.[1][3] There he was taught by Max Reindhart, whose influence had a great effect upon him.[1] Reindhart thought of a script as being similar to a musical score, which should be interpreted by a director in the same way as a musician interpreting a piece of music, and this was an approach with which Cartier agreed.[3] He became involved in the film industry in 1929, when he successfully submitted a script to a company based in Berlin, Germany.[1] He then became a staff scriptwriter for UFA Studios, the primary German film company of the era, for whom he worked on crime films and thrillers.[4] While at UFA, he worked with noted writers, directors and producers such as Ewald AndrĂ© Dupont and Erich Pommer.[3] In 1933 he became a film director, overseeing the thriller Unsichtbare Gegner for producer Sam Spiegel.[2] The same year as Unsichtbare Gegner was released, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and Cartier — who was Jewish — left the country.[2] Another of his UFA colleagues, Billy Wilder, encouraged Cartier to accompany him to Hollywood, which he did — it was at this point that he anglicised his surname.[4] However, unlike Wilder Cartier did not find success in the United States, and in 1935 he immigrated to the United Kingdom.[5] Several members of Cartier's family, including his mother, remained in Europe and were killed in The Holocaust.[2]
At his interview, Cartier told Barry that he thought his department's output was "dreadful,"[8] and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach."[1] He was even more forthright in a 1990 interview about his career, telling BBC Two's The Late Show that the BBC drama department had "needed me like water in the desert."[9] Barry, however, shared many of Cartier's views on the need to improve television drama,[3] and hired him for the producer's job.[8] BBC televisionCartier's first BBC television production was a play entitled Arrow to the Heart, transmitted on the evening of July 20 1952.[6] It was adapted by Cartier himself from the German novel Unruhige Nacht by Albrecht Goes, but Barry felt that the dialogue was not quite right, and assigned drama department staff scriptwriter Nigel Kneale to edit the script.[10] It was the first of many collaborations between the pair, who enjoyed a highly productive working relationship, although at times they could become involved in deep creative arguments concerning particular elements of a production.[11] They were an important presence in British television drama of the era; writing in 2003, the television historian Lez Cooke said that: "Between them, Kneale and Cartier were responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s."[9] Their first major production was the six-part serial The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast in the summer of 1953. A science-fiction story, it related the tale of the eponymous Professor Bernard Quatermass sending the first humans into space, and the consequences when an alien presence invades their rocket during its flight and returns to Earth in the body of the one remaining crewmember. A critical and popular success, The Quatermass Experiment was described by the British Film Institute's "Screenonline" website as "one of the most influential series of the 1950s."[12] Cartier's contribution to the serial's success was highlighted in his 1994 obituary in The Times newspaper, which said that the serial: "became a landmark in British television drama as much for its visual imagination as for its ability to shock and disturb."[3] The success of The Quatermass Experiment led to two sequels, Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), both produced and directed by Cartier and written by Kneale. Both of these were also very successful and critically-acclaimed productions,[13][14] and Cartier's production work on them became increasingly ambitious. For Quatermass II, he pre-filmed a significant amount of material on location on 35 mm film, expanding the drama away from the usual studio-bound television settings with the most ambitious location shooting that had yet been attempted in British television.[15] Cartier, with his previous experience as a film director, particularly enjoyed working on these cinema-style filmed scenes.[16] Away from the Quatermass serials, Cartier and Kneale collaborated on several one-off dramas, including literary and theatrical adaptations Wuthering Heights (December 6 1953) and The Moment of Truth (March 10 1955), and Kneale's own The Creature (January 30 1955).[17] Of particular note was their collaboration on an adaptation of George Orwell's famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally broadcast on December 12 1954 and regarded as Cartier's most famous work.[3] Described by The Times's review the day after its broadcast as having a "vividness... the two minutes' hate was, for instance, a wonderfully riotious orgy of vindictiveness,"[18] the production also attracted a considerable degree of controversy. There were questions asked in the House of Commons concerning some of the graphic scenes of horror in the play,[19] and the BBC received several telephone calls threatening Cartier's life if the second live performance, scheduled for December 16, went ahead.[20] The BBC took these threats seriously enough to assign him bodyguards.[20] Cartier appeared live on television himself to defend the production in a studio debate, and eventually the Board of Governors of the BBC voted that the second performance should go ahead as planned.[21] The production had by this time received some notable backing; the Duke of Edinburgh commented during a speech to the Royal Society of Arts that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the first performance.[22] Nineteen Eighty-Four had been a success, but it was also one of the most expensive television dramas that had then been made in the UK.[23] Cartier often spent large amounts of money on his productions, and earlier in 1954 Michael Barry had heavily criticised him for the money and resources he had employed in an adaptation of Rebecca. In a memo to Cartier written after that production's transmission, Barry admonished Cartier for his over-ambitious production."The performance of Rebecca seems to me to have taken us further into the danger area instead of showing any improvement. I am unable to defend at a time when departmental costs and scene loads are in an acute state the load imposed by Rebecca on Design and Supply and the expenditure upon extras and costumes... the vast area of the hall and the stairway never justified the great expenditure of effort required in building and one is left with a very clear impression of reaching a point where the department must be accused of not knowing what it is doing."[24] Despite Barry's concerns, Cartier continued to work successfully in television, and at the 1957 Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards (later known as the British Academy Television Awards, or BAFTAs) he was the winner of the Drama category.[1] He made a brief return to film-making in 1958 when he directed the feature Passionate Summer, but he saw himself primarily as a television director, and it remained his favourite medium.[2] "The essence of television is that you can control the viewer's response to a much greater extent than other media permit," he told The Times in 1958.[5] He did not direct only dramas, however. Cartier had a great passion for opera, and this enthusiasm saw him directing several operatic productions for BBC television.[3] He oversaw adaptations of established operas such as Salome (1957) and Carmen (1962) as well as original productions written especially for television.[2] Tobias and the Angel, written for the BBC by Sir Arthur Bliss and Christopher Hassall and produced by Cartier in 1960, won the Merit Award in the Salaburg Opera Prize at the 1962 Salzburg Festival.[25] Cartier continued to direct television dramas during the 1960s, although after Barry stepped down as Head of Drama in 1961 he lost much of his creative independence. Barry's successor, Sydney Newman, abolished the BBC's traditional producer-director role and split the responsibilities into separate posts, leaving directors such as Cartier with less control over their productions.[2] He also found himself assigned to direct episodes of regular drama series, as such as Maigret and Z-Cars.[2] He was still able to direct several notable productions during the decade, including a number which explored the Nazi era in Germany from which he had escaped in 1933. These incluced the World War II dramas Cross of Iron (1961, dealing with the court martial of a U-Boat captain in a British prisoner of war camp) and The July Plot (1964, about the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler), as well as Firebrand (1967, about the 1933 Reichstag fire, an event Cartier had personally witnessed).[2] He also began, for the first time, to direct pieces which dealt with history to which he had a more personal connection, The Holocaust. These included Doctor Korczak and the Children (1962, concerning the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage) and The Joel Brand Story (1965, about Adolf Eichmann's 1944 offer to the Allies of the lives of 1 million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks).[2] Other notable 1960s productions included adaptations of Anna Karenina (1961, starring Sean Connery and Claire Bloom) and Wuthering Heights (1962, a new version of Kneale's 1953 script, starring Bloom and Keith Michell).[2][26] Lee Oswald — Assassin (1966) was a drama-documentary telling the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, based on the Warren Commission's findings, while Conversation at Night (1969) saw the first ever television acting appearance of Alec Guinness.[2] Cartier continued directing into the 1970s, helming episodes of Fall of Eagles (1974).[6] His final directing credit came on the play Loyalties, screened in 1976.[6] By this time, he had worked on over 120 productions for the BBC.[3] Subsequently, he worked for a time for the BBC's "purchased drama" department, advising on which plays and series might be bought-in from European broadcasters.[3] Throughout his career he refused ever to work for commercial television, disliking the idea of adverts interrupting his work. "I hate the idea of my creative work being constantly interrupted for commercial reasons. I am an artist, not a salesman," he once commented.[3] He was married three times, lastly to Margaret Pepper, whom he married in 1949 and remained with until his death.[1] He had one daughter with Pepper, and another from a previous marriage.[3] He died on June 7 1994, at the age of 90; his death was overshadowed in the media by that of Dennis Potter, another important figure in the history of British television drama, who died on the same day.[27] LegacyNearly all of Cartier's 1950s television productions were performed live, and the majority of them were not recorded — he once described them as being "gone with the speed of light."[2] Several of those which do survive have been highly regarded by later reviewers. In 2000, the British Film Institute (BFI) compiled a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century. Voted on by a group of industry professionals, the list featured both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Quatermass and the Pit.[28] In the accompanying analysis of each entry to the list, Nineteen Eighty-Four was described as "An early example of the power of television drama... Even now, the torture sequences retain their power to shock and disturb."[29] Nigel Kneale, scriptwriter of both of the Cartier dramas acclaimed by the BFI, felt that the productions would not have been as successful as they were had they been handled by any other director. "I don't think any of the things I wrote then would have come to anything much in other hands. In his they worked."[30] Television historian Jason Jacobs, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, wrote in 2000 that Kneale and Cartier together created an entirely new, more expansive vision for British television drama in the 1950s."It was the arrival of Nigel Kneale... and Rudolph Cartier... that challenged the intimate drama directly. Cartier is rightly recognised as a major influence on the visual development of British television drama... Cartier and Kneale had the ambition for their productions to have an impact on a mass audience, and the scope of their attention was not confined to the 'cosy' aesthetics of intimacy. Cartier uses the close-up both to reveal emotions and as a shock device: a more threatening — and perhaps exhilerating — method than was used before. 'Intimacy' is reformulated by Cartier in terms of his power and control over the viewer — no longer a part of the family, but isolated in his home."[31] Cartier's pioneering use of an increased number of pre-filmed sequences to open out the studio-bound, live television drama productions of the 1950s is also praised by Lez Cooke. "While film inserts were being used in television drama from the early 1950s, Nineteen Eighty-Four represented the most extensive use of them in a TV play up to that time, and signalled Cartier's determination to extend the boundaries of TV drama."[32] Similarly, his Times obituary stated that: "At a time when studio productions were usually as static as the conventional theatre, he was widely respected for a creative contribution to British television drama which gave it a new dimension."[3] It was not only Cartier's 1950s productions that gained critical praise; several of his later works have also been regarded as influential. His 1962 production of Wuthering Heights was praised by Dennis Potter, then a television critic, who wrote in Daily Herald newspaper that the production "was like a thunderstorm on the flat, dreary plains of the week's television... The howl of the wind against the windows, the muted pain of Claire Bloom as the wretched Cathy, and the hunted misery of Keith Mitchell as Heathcliff, made this a more than adequate offering of a great work."[26] While "Screenonline" states that Lee Oswald — Assassin (1966) "could be argued [to be] of historical interest only," due to its basis in the flawed Warren Commission report,[33] The Times praised it as being "possibly the first drama-documentary."[3] Speaking to The Times in 1958, Cartier felt that television was still developing as a medium, and that part of his work was to help create the next generation of those who would produce television drama. "The BBC is producing producers as well as plays. They are feeling their way towards what television drama will one day be, and we are trying to create a generation of writers who study the medium."[5] His 1994 obituary in the same newspaper felt that he had been successful in creating a lasting influence on later producers, describing his 1962 production of the opera Carmen as "an example and inspiration to a younger generation of television producers."[3] In 1990, the BBC Two arts magazine programme The Late Show produced an edition which featured a retrospective of Cartier's work, including a new interview with the director discussing his career.[34] This feature was repeated on BBC Two under the title Rudolph Cartier: A Television Pioneer on July 1 1994, followed by a tribute screening of the surviving telerecording copy of the second performance of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[35] Footnotes
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