John Brabourne

Publish date: 2024-09-25

Producer

John Brabourne, the seventh Baron Brabourne and film and television producer who helped found Bafta in its current guise, died Sept. 22 in Kent, England. He was 80.

Brabourne never used his prestigious title professionally and rose from humble runner to Oscar-nominated producer (“A Passage to India” and “Romeo and Juliet”) on merit alone.

He was born John Ulick Knatchbull, the second son of the fifth Lord Brabourne, a Conservative party MP and governor of Bombay who died when John was in his teens. At just 19 years old, John became the seventh Baron when his older brother was killed trying to escape a German prisoner of war camp in Italy in 1943.

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Brabourne followed the traditional path for a man of his breeding — Eton school, then Oxford university — but later confessed that trips to the cinema, not lectures were his real love, “I went to the cinema twice a day and three times on Sunday.”

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During the Second World War, Brabourne served as an officer in the British Army and later as aide-de-camp to Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Brabourne married Mountbatten’s eldest daughter in 1946 at a high-profile wedding attended by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Aware of his son-in law’s burning desire to work in the film industry, Mountbatten introduced Brabourne to the producer Ian Dalrymple who got him his first gig as a runner on Jack Lee’s “The Wooden Horse,” coincidentally a war film about three British POW’s attempt to escape Nazi Germany.

Brabourne soon made the step up to production manager on Mario Soldati’s Venice-shot “The Stranger’s Hand” (1952) and Powell-Pressburger production “The Battle of River Plate” (1956.)

It wasn’t long until Brabourne earned his first producer credit on “Harry Black and the Tiger” (1958) an adventure set in India, a country he knew well. He went on to produce Lewis Gilbert’s “Sink The Bismarck!” (1960.) Buoyed by the film’s success, Brabourne was emboldened to establish British Home Entertainment, an early pay TV experiment which brought canned theater, including film versions of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre production of “Othello” (1965,) Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death” (1968) and “The Mikado” (1966) to the small screen. BHB achieved the maximum of 150,000 subscibers but went out of business when the Postmaster-General refused to sanction an increase.

But Brabourne’s continued to produce features. Highlights include Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” (1968,) Sidney Lumet’s “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and David Lean’s “A Passage To India” (1984) for which he was Bafta and Oscar-nommed.

In the 1970s, Brabourne served as director and later chairman of Thames Television and was instrumental in raising the funds needed to merge the British Film Academy and the Society of Film and Television Arts into Bafta.

In 1979 he was lucky to survive when a small fishing boat he was aboard off the coast of Ireland was blown up by the IRA. The bomb killed Lord Mountbatten and Brabourne’s mother and son. Brabourne, his wife and another son were seriously injured. Brabourne is survived by his wife Patricia, four sons and two daughters.

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