Alvin Rakoff, Emmy-winning director who gave Sean Connery and Alan Rickman their breaks

He urged Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to cast Connery as Bond, rather than Roger Moore or the more accomplished actor Patrick McGoohan

Alvin Rakoff, who has died aged 97, was a Canadian shopkeeper’s son who went from telegram boy to a film and television director and producer who gave Sean Connery his first major role; he also gave a young drama student called Alan Rickman his first professional acting job and was unwise enough to stand up to Bette Davis (who got him sacked).
Rakoff made dozens of television plays, winning two Emmys, the first for Call Me Daddy (1969), broadcast on ITV’s Armchair Theatre slot, in which Donald Pleasence played a creepy middle-aged businessman who blackmails a typist (Judy Cornwell) into spending a week with him. The following year Rakoff directed the production when, re-titled Hoffman, it transferred to the big screen, starring Peter Sellers and Sinead Cusack.
Rakoff won a second Emmy in 1982 for directing the television film version of John Mortimer’s semi-autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father, starring Laurence Olivier as the cantankerous blind barrister father and Alan Bates as his adoring and long-suffering son.
More recently, in 1997 he produced and co-directed (with Christopher Morahan) A Dance to the Music of Time, Channel 4’s ambitious four-part adaptation of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume comic portrait of 20th-century upper class and bohemian society, which won Simon Russell Beale a Bafta best actor award for his role as Kenneth Widmerpool.
Rakoff also found time to write three novels, numerous screenplays and two volumes of memoirs, in which he recalled his poverty-stricken early life and the business of television production in its early days.
Alvin Abraham Rakoff was born in Toronto on February 6 1927, the third of seven children of Sam Rakoff, originally from Voronezh, Russia, and Pearl, née Isenberg, originally from Rovno, Ukraine.
His parents ran a general store but, as Alvin recalled, his father was a hopeless businessman and during the Depression, the family lived in grinding poverty: “I remember vividly eating nothing but onion sandwiches. My mother begged bread off the baker, and went through the rejects at the fruit store. We had a coal stove but we often couldn’t afford to cook the onions.”
Things looked up during the Second World War, when his father worked nights in a munitions factory and the store, run by his mother, began attracting more customers, Alvin contributing to family finances by working during summer holidays as a telegram delivery boy.
A trip to the cinema when he was six ignited an interest in storytelling, and after earning enough money to pay his way through a psychology degree at the University of Toronto, he wrote to every newspaper in Ontario, but only found temporary jobs: “so my brother and I agreed we’d take over the business from my father. But first, I said: ‘I want one more weekend in New York, doing things I love.’ ”
He went to see Marlon Brando on stage in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “It electrified me,” he recalled. “I telegraphed my brother: ‘You keep the business. No matter what, I’m going to try to go into the creative world.”
He began writing for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nascent television service, then in 1942, selling his Chrysler Dodge to buy a boat ticket, he sailed to the UK – “the place where TV started”.
“I’d been told on the boat that I’d never get a job because the BBC didn’t hire foreigners,” he recalled, “but within four days I was on Children’s Hour talking about Canadian national parks. In 1953 I had my first major BBC assignment, adapting the Irwin Shaw novel The Troubled Air.”
The BBC subsequently invited him to join their television directors’ and producers’ training course, and at the age of 26 he became the youngest producer/director in the BBC drama department. In 1954 his television adaptation of the stage play Waiting for Gillian won a national television award.
In 1956 Rakoff found himself in a tight spot when Jack Palance pulled out of rehearsals for a BBC Sunday-Night Theatre production of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, about an over-the-hill boxing champion. Rakoff knew Sean Connery and had cast him in small non-speaking parts – “Mumbles, can’t get the words out,” was the note on his card. But he had charisma, and Rakoff’s wife Jacqueline thought he was worth the risk. “He came round late on Saturday and, by Sunday evening, I’d decided to take a chance,” Rakoff recalled.
As rehearsals progressed, Rakoff was repeatedly told he had blundered. His boss, Michael Barry, said he wanted Connery fired. But when the show was broadcast in March 1957, the critical response to Connery’s performance was uniformly enthusiastic. Hollywood talent scouts soon came calling.
A few years later, Rakoff received a telephone call from Harry Saltzman and “Cubby” Broccoli, who were considering Patrick McGoohan, Roger Moore and Sean Connery for the role of James Bond and wanted his opinion. McGoohan was the best actor, he told them, Moore the most affable, but the one they should cast was Connery.
In 1962, the BBC asked Rakoff, who had gone freelance by this time, to produce and direct Heart to Heart, its entry for the European-wide “Largest Theatre In The World” project, written by Terence Rattigan and starring Kenneth More, Ralph Richardson and Wendy Craig. The Sunday Telegraph described it as “towering head and shoulders over most TV drama”.
Two years later, to mark the launch of BBC Two, Rakoff was chosen to direct Ken Taylor’s Seekers trilogy, filling the first three Sunday-night drama slots.
Rakoff’s run-in with Bette Davis occurred in 1968 when Hammer Films chose him to direct a film version of the hit West End play, The Anniversary, to star Bette Davis with Sheila Hancock and James Cossins. The British cast were told that Miss Davis was to command their utmost respect, and that they were not to approach her directly on set.
Within a few days it was clear that the Hollywood actress was not prepared to take or even talk about direction of any kind. When Rakoff stood up to her, the producers received a legal letter: “Miss Davis regrets she cannot continue until a director more sympathetic to her methods of working is found.” Rakoff was unceremoniously fired and replaced by Roy Ward Baker.
In 1973 he directed The Adventures of Don Quixote for BBC Play of the Month, filmed in locations suggested in Cervantes’s novel and starring Rex Harrison as the aging knight errant and Frank Finlay as his faithful squire Sancho Panza. In his 1978 production of Romeo & Juliet for the BBC Television Shakespeare series he cast the then unknown Alan Rickman as Tybalt.
Rakoff directed some dozen feature films including On Friday at Eleven (1961) starring Rod Steiger; Say Hello to Yesterday (1971), an ill-starred update of Brief Encounter; City on Fire (1979) starring Henry Fonda, Ava Gardner and Shelley Winters; and the critically panned horror film Death Ship (1980), which, he explained, “I only agreed because the producer promised: ‘We won’t put your name on it.’ Of course, he put my name on it.” It is now a cult classic.
In 1958 Rakoff married the actress Jacqueline Hill, known for her 1963 role as Barbara Wright, the first Doctor Who companion to appear on-screen. She died of cancer in 1993, and in 1996 his novel & Gillian was an affectionate portrayal of married life – and an unsparing account of bereavement.
Alvin Rakoff also directed stage plays and in 2013 he married Sally Hughes, managing director of The Mill Theatre in Sonning, Berkshire, where he directed several productions. Rakoff continued working on ideas for new projects until his final year. His wife survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage and a stepson.
Alvin Rakoff, born February 6 1927, died October 12 2024