Norman Spencer, who has died aged 110, was a writer, producer and production manager who played a crucial role in David Lean’s breakthrough films, including In Which We Serve (1942), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); towards the end of his life, he was reportedly the oldest man living in the Greater London area, and the second oldest man living in the United Kingdom overall.
Beginning as third assistant director on In Which We Serve and working his way up to unit manager on Blithe Spirit (1945) and associate producer on The Passionate Friends (1949), Spencer helped Lean define the notion of quality British cinema. Entertainments above all else, these collaborations were also emotionally expressive, and supported by the best craft the British industry could afford in the post-War years; like Spencer himself, they endured.
The pair parted ways creatively after rewriting The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) – where Spencer suggested The Colonel Bogey March be whistled rather than sung, the better to avoid censorship issues with the bawdy lyrics – meaning these early ventures typically lacked the scale of Lean’s later widescreen epics. Yet they were similarly rooted in considered storytelling, born of long brainstorming sessions over tea and coffee in Lean’s offices.
The results were hilariously comic in the case of Hobson’s Choice (1954), for which Spencer urged Lean to forsake his initial casting choice Roger Livesey in favour of Charles Laughton. (The script earned Spencer, Lean and Wynyard Browne a BAFTA nomination.) They were more poignant when addressing a seasoned Katharine Hepburn’s quest for love in Summertime (1955), its extensive Venice location work indicating the new, international direction Lean was travelling in. As the filmmaker put it, British soundstages were “a pitch-black mine… I prefer the sun.”
The pair fought several battles along the way. According to Spencer, Noël Coward doubted Lean’s capacity to adapt Blithe Spirit: “He said that David Lean had no sense of humour, he shouldn’t go anywhere near comedy, but he was wrong”. Lean only inherited The Passionate Friends after a cast revolt against original director Ronald Neame. The War Office repeatedly tried to halt production on Kwai, claiming a British officer would never behave as Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson does.
Lean’s singular mix of perfectionism and distractibility, specifically his susceptibility to the opposite sex, posed its own challenges. Conceived as a vehicle for the director’s new wife Ann Todd, Madeleine (1950) proved a particular trial to shoot (“the marriage was going wrong”). As Spencer noted: “[David] was a huge womaniser: to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women. When we shot [Hobson's Choice] in the streets, people asked: ‘Who’s that good-looking actor?’ I had to say: ‘That’s not the leading man, it’s the director.”
Spencer nevertheless persevered, returning to assist Lean on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where he liaised with Morocco’s King Hassan II on locations, and sourced the many extras required for the film’s populous battle scenes. “We had to have a thousand camel saddles made, and we had to teach the camel riders in Morocco to ride in the way they ride in Jordan, which was a huge undertaking,” Spencer recalled. “But it had to be done, because the scenes had to match.”
Norman Leslie Spencer was born in Stockwell, London on August 13, 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. He spent his childhood years in Essex, where the family relocated; after seeing his first film, aged nine, in Leigh-on-Sea, he pestered his parents for a toy projector.
Spencer left school aged fourteen and briefly worked as a commercial artist in central London, where he landed his first break. While painting a mural at a dance studio in Great Portland Street, the dancers told him various studios were hiring extras for crowd scenes, paying one guinea a day. Spencer duly volunteered his services at Pinewood, eventually appearing in barrack-room comedy Splinters in the Air (1937).
But it was over at rival Denham Studios where Spencer put down creative roots, appearing uncredited in the Marlene Dietrich/Robert Donat romance Knight Without Armor (1937) and as an athlete in A Yank at Oxford (1938). While apprenticing elsewhere – his first screen credit came as a clapper loader on the Madame Tussaud’s-set horror Midnight at the Wax Museum (1936) – he developed a profitable sideline as a stand-in, doubling for such stars as George Formby and Leslie Howard, and thereby earning an extra five pounds a week.
It was at Denham that Spencer first met Lean, then working as an editor: “We were both mad about film and started going to the pictures together with our wives. I remember one time David saying: ‘The sound is terribly low on this – let’s speak to the manager.’ The manager said loftily: ‘You don’t understand. The film comes to us and there's nothing we can do.’ David said: ‘Let me up to the projector room.’ Imagine David Lean being told he didn’t know about these things!”
Spencer was duly invited aboard when Lean formed Cineguild Productions with Coward and Neame in the wake of In Which We Serve’s success. Yet external circumstances meant he had to turn down a scheduled first assistant director gig on This Happy Breed (1944), Lean’s morale-boosting adaptation of Coward’s hit play: “Shooting was about five weeks away when I got my call-up papers. There was nothing anybody could do about it, and I was called up into the army.”
Following his Lean collaborations, Spencer himself branched out, overseeing the druggily existential road trip Vanishing Point (1971), a film as far from Lean as it was possible to get. Berated by critics – The New York Times’ Roger Greenspun called it “a movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say” – Vanishing Point was embraced by young audiences who thrilled to its anti-authoritarian vibe. Spencer called it his most notable success as a producer: a scrappy idea – handed to him by the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante – converted into a major countercultural hit.
Later, Spencer operated as a middleman for journalist Donald Woods and director Richard Attenborough (who’d made his acting debut in In Which We Serve) on the project that became Cry Freedom (1987). This was a sweeping, awards-courting epic in the Lean vein, centred on the friendship between liberal South African Woods (Kline) and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington); it was nominated for three Oscars and seven BAFTAs, winning Best Sound at the latter.
By that point, Spencer was an old hand, and British cinema had become far grander than the cottage industry he’d passed into fifty years before. Interviewed in 1999, he recalled the early days of working with Lean: “We started making films together and when we’d finished one, we’d always want to make another right away. We’d haunt bookshops, and he’d say, ‘Within nine feet of us is a wonderful idea for a film.’”
He married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and is survived by the couple’s two children, including the actress Sally-Jane Spencer, who made her uncredited screen debut, aged four, in Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952).
Norman Spencer, born August 13, 1914, died August 16, 2024.
