Paul Almond began his career producing and directing over 100 television dramas for the CBC in Canada, the BBC, ABC and Granada TV in England (where he created the landmark documentary 7Up) and many others here in the United States. He has won numerous awards, among them 12 Genies (Canadian Academy Awards) including Best Feature Director and Best TV Director, and a Hollywood Golden Globe Nomination for Best Foreign Picture and another by his peers in the DGA as Best Feature Director. He has written, produced and directed motion pictures for such major studios as Paramount, Universal and MGM. His trilogy starring Genevieve Bujold, Isabel, Act of the Heart, and Journey, is considered part of the Canadian film canon. A retrospective of his films toured Canada in 2000-2001.
He has written or adapted a dozen plays for television and five screenplays for motion pictures. He published High Hopes: Coming of Age at the Mid Century with ECW Press, Toronto, and La Vengeance des Dieux, a French translation of his novel with Art Global, Montreal. He was recently appointed to the Order of Canada, his country's highest honour.
Paul Almond's career began in 1954 and since then he has produced and directed over a hundred television dramas. His company, Quest Film Productions, which closed in 2003, was the oldest motion picture company in Canada. From 1967 onwards, it produced five feature films, which he wrote and directed.
The youngest producer-director at the CBC, he soon won the Liberty Award for Best Canadian Tv Producer (director) in 1958. The first TV play he wrote, produced, and directed, The Hill, won an Ohio State Award for Television excellence in that same year. The BBC brought him to London to repeat it in 1959, causing one London paper to headline: "Agony on TV Jolts Nation". That year he won another Ohio State Award for his own adaptation of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, the citation reading: "brilliantly conceived and executed, beautifully staged and performed, a brilliant illustration of creativity, integrity and respect for art."
Granada Television brought him back to London specially to direct the first play Tenessee Williams ever permitted on television, The Rose Tattoo. He began to work frequently in England: he wrote, produced and directed the first Seven Up which won the Special Diploma of Merit at the 1965 Prague International TV Festival. This began the remarkable series of six films on these seven-year-old children continued by Michael Apted, whom Almond had brought on as an apprentice.
He began to concentrate on the classics, such as Macbeth with Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell, followed by a two-and-a-half hour Julius Caesar, and Charles Israel's The Labarynth which became the Canadian entry for the prestigious Italia Prize. His production of Anouilh's Romeo and Jeannette introduced both Michael Sarrazin and Genevieve Bujold to the English Canadian audience.
As well as garnering praise, Almond was often the subject of controversy. General Motors refused to run his production of Shadow of a Pale Horse because they claimed his direction of a lynching scene was too realistic. The CBC ran it anyway in its own time slot. Again, the Ford Motor Company refused to run Anouilh's Point of Departure starring William Shatner in its Startime series, calling it "too sexy". The production was later aired in its own time slot, and won another Ohio State Award, which cited it as: "a superb dramatic production of a lucid and articulate play... a work of art presented for an intelligent adult audience... absorbing and compelling, it is television drama at its finest."
At the same time, Almond began working in documentaries: two religious films in Israel and Jordan; an evocative study of his first wife and daughter in a ballet using freeze-frame techniques later taken up by NFB's Norman McLaren; and a haunting story of his youth on the Gaspé Coast, "October Beach", a preliminary study for his first feature film.
He occasionally accepted work on prestigious series on US television, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or William Shatner's highly praised For The People, the first series shot entirely on the streets of New York City. He was also brought to New York by David Susskind to help Harold Clurman stage Giraudoux' Tiger at the Gates for NBC's Play of the Week.
Almond's first feature film, Isabel, from his own screenplay for Paramount Pictures, with Genevieve Bujold, won him a Directors Guild of America Nomination for Best Feature Film Director as well as a number of Canadian Genie nominations and awards.
His second feature, Act of the Heart, again from his own screenplay for Universal, with Bujold and Donald Sutherland, also won him a Genie as Best Feature Director and again made many "ten best" lists in newspapers across the United States.
Other feature films which he wrote followed: Journey, a haunting story recalling the sixties which became something of a cult classic; one about his childhood in a co-ed boarding school, Ups & Downs; and The Dance Goes On, about a father-son relationship which parallels his own with his son Matthew, now a teacher in East Los Angeles. His last television drama for CBC won him Genie for Best TV Director and a Montreal TV commercial won him a Coq d'Or. Captive Hearts, for MGM starring Pat Morita and Michael Sarrazin, a war-time story set in Japan decided the great Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes) to ask Almond to come and help him shape his film classic Rikyu for international audiences
An actor's director and having a superb visual eye, Almond began visiting the New York Actor's Studio in 1957, when Vivian Nathan, one of its charter members, worked with him in Toronto. He began using improvisational techniques unknown on live television at the time. He has handled such diverse talents as: Broadway performers Rosemary Harris, Zoe Caldwell, Kate Reid, African Americans such as Dick Gregory, Ruby Dee & Ossie Davis; London West End theatre's Keith Michell and Hugh Griffiths; directors Sydney Furie, George Macowan and Charles Jarrott when beginning their careers as actors; Cathleen Nesbitt, Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Burgess Meredith in their eighties; Star Trekkers Bill Shatner and Jimmie Doohan, Avengers' Pat Macnee, and other Canadians who became stars in the US such as Lorne Greene and Michael Learned.
He has produced and directed plays by great playwrights: Edward Albee, Jean Anouilh, Ugo Betti, George M Cohan, Giraudoux, Pinter, Christopher Fry, John Mortimer, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Hailey and Shakespeare; and made his own adaptations of works by Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, John Cheever, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Edgar Wallace, and T.S. Eliot.
Much of the above is contained in a biography of him "The Flame Within" written by Janet Edsforth, and published by the Canadian Film Institute.
After forty years in film, Paul Almond has returned to serious writing. His first publication was High Hopes: Coming of Age at the Mid-century, EWC Press, October 1999, and his second a novel La Vengeance des Dieux, Art Global, November 1999.
He has spent the last ten years writing several volumes of The Alford Saga. The first book, The Deserter, is due out in mid-October.
(McArthur & Co.)