BBC News | UK | Blair joins tributes to Jill Craigie Tuesday, 14 December, 1999, 14:24 GMT Blair joins tributes to Jill Craigie Michael Foot and Jill Craigie: "Devoted" couple Labour politicians have paid tribute to film-maker and author Jill Craigie, the wife of former Labour leader Michael Foot. Ms Craigie died on Monday night at the Royal Free Hospital in north west London, aged 85. She had been ill for some time, and a fall in the summer had exacerbated a heart condition. Prime Minister Tony Blair said the news was "devastating" and that her husband had been "devoted" to her. Former Labour Prime Minister Lord Callaghan of Cardiff said she had been a "a courageous lady of deep conviction". Baroness Castle of Blackburn, a former Labour Employment Secretary and Social Services Secretary, said she had been "highly intelligent" and "beautiful". Ms Craigie had had a long and highly successful career as an actress, film-maker, author and authority on the suffragettes.

She was also regarded as a great source of strength to her husband, who was leader of the Labour Party and the Opposition between 1980 and 1983. Postwar fame Jill Craigie was born in Derbyshire, the only child of Scottish-Russian parentage, and spent much of her youth at boarding school. Foot at the '99 Labour conference: Craigie denied driving his career While working at her first job, writing novelettes, she began developing and writing film scripts. Her talent fully emerged in the postwar years when she became Britain's first woman film director, gaining sponsorship and general releases for her films. She was famous for flouting convention, starting with documentaries and progressing to fictional films with a distinct socialist content. She shocked Britain's cinema world by proving that films about ordinary people were box-office material. Her two most acclaimed films were Blue Scar, about the everyday lives of miners, and The Way We Live, based on plans for the rebuilding of Plymouth after the devastation of the Second World War. At the door of their South Wales home in 1983 In Wales, Blue Scar reportedly broke the records of the big box office films of 1948.

Political driving force Ms Craigie married Michael Foot in 1949, when she was 34 and well-established, and he was 36 and an aspiring politician. She also by then had a 13-year-old daughter Julie, by a previous marriage. The couple had no children themselves but were fully committed to their family life with Julie and, later, her four children. They lived in a flat in Hampstead, north London, and a cottage in Ebbw Vale, South Wales. Throughout her marriage Ms Craigie continued an independent career, but always put her married life first. Some went so far as to say she was the driving force behind her husband's political career, a role she always denied. In latter years Ms Craigie became more involved with her book on the suffragette movement. She believed she had one of the largest collections of feminist literature in Britain, with pamphlets dating back to John Stuart Mill. Ms Craigie last hit the headlines a year ago, after she confirmed reports that she had been beaten and raped by the late Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler shortly after she was married.

Search BBC News Online OBITUARIES: Jill Craigie | The Independent OBITUARIES: Jill Craigie Wednesday 15 December 1999 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture JILL CRAIGIE was not Britain's first woman film director - there had been several in the silent days, notably Dinah Shurey, while early talkies included films directed by Mary Field, later head of the Children's Film Foundation, and the authoress Elinor Glyn - but Craigie was the first to achieve a combination of critical acclaim, publicity and wide distribution. She was also the first to bring a consciously political and feminist viewpoint to her work. The wife of the politician Michael Foot for the last 50 years, she continued throughout her life to be a champion of left- wing causes and was prominent in the world of politics. More recently she made headlines when a biography of the writer Arthur Koestler revealed that Craigie had been raped by Koestler in 1952, a fact Craigie concealed from her husband for 40 years.

Born in 1914 and, according to Michael Foot's biographer Mervyn Jones, raised in a home of "discord and division", she was educated in various boarding schools. In 1932 she obtained work as a journalist on a teenage magazine, after which she worked for the London branch of the Hearst newspaper syndicate. A vivacious brunette, at the age of 19 she married a sculptor, Claude Begbie-Clench, mainly she said later to escape the harassment suffered by a young girl living in London; they had a daughter, but he was an alcoholic and the marriage did not last. She flirted briefly with acting, and in 1937 had a featured role in the film Make Up, a circus melodrama co-written by Jeffrey Dell, who became her second husband. From 1940 to 1942 she wrote propaganda shorts for the British Council, and in 1943 co-scripted with Dell a film about two heroic Belgian airmen, The Flemish Farm, which was directed by Dell and inspired in Craigie an ambition to direct. "I developed a great urge to make a documentary for myself," she explained later.

"I did decide, quite deliberately, why shouldn't a woman make a film? It was a male-dominated industry from top to bottom." She added, "I couldn't go to the cutting rooms or anything . . . Carol Reed cut his teeth on B pictures. David Lean started as a tea-boy and worked his way up. I had no experience whatsoever, and you need a lot of experience to master the technical side." Filippo Del Giudice, head of Two Cities films, was a champion of Craigie, and signed her to direct Out of Chaos, a pioneering attempt to introduce people to modern art, featuring interviews with Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. The film prompted Craigie to start a campaign to get wider showings for documentaries and for "non- entertainment films" to be distributed to mainstream cinemas. Two Cities films were distributed by the Rank Organisation, headed by the conservative J. Arthur Rank, and it surprised some people when in 1945 he agreed to let Craigie make a full-length semi-documentary about post-war housing, with an emphasis on the effect town planning has on people and how they can affect the planning process. "I went to see Mr Rank . . .

I said why can't we have, instead of the usual B pictures, which were awful, cheap American stuff that they got for nothing, why can't we have films that are about a serious purpose, as long as they are entertaining. Rank fell for this idea. He was rather pro it." Craigie both wrote and directed The Way We Live, released in 1946, which told of post-war life and re- adjustment for an average British family in Plymouth, the most devastated town in England - and coincidentally the first town to send a woman (Lady Astor) to Parliament. Craigie said: I set out to show that town planning must be integrated with everyday life. I went to people and asked them what they really wanted . . . not what I wanted. The whole content of the film came from the people, from the architects, from the town councillors, and I was just the interpreter. During the film's making, Craigie received a lot of publicity, though she was not happy about most of it. "I had an enormous amount of publicity, just because I was a woman," she said: "all for the wrong reasons.

`Although she's in charge of 40 men, she's very feminine' - that sort of terrible stuff." The Way We Live was an early attempt at British neo-realism, a polemic piece of film-making as activism, rare indeed in the cinema of the time, and it did not find favour with Rank's chief accountant and head of distribution, John Davis. Davis was already known to dislike Del Giudice, whom he regarded as a rival for power within the organisation, and did what he could to sabotage Two Cities projects - he had earlier previewed Henry V in the East End, where eggs (though still rationed) were thrown at the screen. He did the same thing with The Way We Live. First he tried to stop the film in mid-production, claiming that it was costing too much (the total cost was pounds 40,000), then after premiering the film in the East End, where it was booed, he gave it a trial run in Warrington during "wakes week", when he knew the city would be almost empty. But the critic C.A.

Lejeune noticed a tiny review in the trade press which described the film as "intelligent, thoughtful and comprehensive" and she rallied her colleagues, who demanded to see the film then wrote about it at length, as a result of which Rank gave it proper distribution. Starting with the on-screen declaration, "This film is made for the peoples of the blitz in the hope that their newly built cities will be worthy of their fortitude", the film showed the real-life efforts of the mayor and town planners to fulfil their vision of reconstruction, the city engineer stating, "A town should be for the townsfolk what a country estate is for the rich man." It showed a typical family, the Copperwheats, a couple with three daughters and mother-in-law, living in cramped billets, the eldest daughter finding relief dancing with sailors on the Hoe, while the politicians argue about the cost of fulfilling the architects' dreams. The film ends with the townsfolk staging a march of protest with banners proclaiming, "Premises Not Promises". Though Craigie was unable to get convincing performances from some of her non-professional players, the film is a potent document of life and attitudes in the period just after the war and provides fascinating viewing.

It was an important project for Craigie for another reason - she met Michael Foot, who appears in the film making an impassioned plea for funds to be made available for reconstruction. Foot was then Labour candidate for Devonport, running against the sitting member Leslie Hore-Belisha in what many considered a hopeless fight since Hore- Belisha had held the seat since the early Twenties. Foot wrote later: Jill Craigie was a raging beauty let loose on a susceptible wartime London. She had the colouring of an English rose but everything else was a romantic, mysterious addition. She was half Scottish and half Russian, not a tincture of English reserve in her make-up. She had Celtic and Russian fires and passions intermingled with what seemed an inborn gift for appreciating painting and music and, as it seemed to me, every other art. Among Craigie's suitors of the time, he said, were such representatives of the arts as the sculptor Henry Moore, the architect Sir Charles Reilly, the composer Vaughan Williams and the artist Paul Nash. Her relationship with Moore, in particular, had been intense enough for her to say later, "It would have gone further if he hadn't been married.

Once you received hospitality from the wife, and I liked her, I didn't want to give in to temptation. Some of us girls were rather more honourable in those days than they are now." Craigie first met Foot in London, when she was preparing her film, and Foot wooed her at the Ivy, though at the time she was married to a second husband and had a young daughter. "I liked his mind," said Craigie, "and I liked his myopic look in his eyes and his smile, and he was rugged and unconventional." Craigie's first two marriages were unhappy ones, and she knew that Foot had something of a reputation ("He had lots of pretty girls before me, you know") but the two soon embarked on an affair. "I remember saying to Michael when I very first met him," said Craigie, " `If you ever have any extra needs I don't want to know, and even more important I don't want anyone else to know. That's the price you have to pay.' And I think that's quite a decent attitude, isn't it? A fair one? And that's how it is.

He's pretty secretive." According to Foot, the couple made excellent use of Hampstead Heath's hedgerow shelters during the early days of their courtship, but during Parliament's summer recess he suggested a luxurious "honeymoon" in Nice, though the two were still unable to marry. Staying at the Negresco, they were among the first English post-war visitors to the French Riviera and had whole beaches to themselves for what Foot described as "10 delirious days and nights". On their return, Craigie found a crowd of reporters outside her Hampstead home asking if it were true that she had been to the South of France with Michael Foot. She replied, "I'll ask him if you like", and rang Foot at his flat. "A little while later", related Foot, he devised this reply: Michael Foot offers his fraternal greetings to his fellow journalists - and the reminder that, if anything appears in the newspapers about his visit to France, he will be happy to reveal his latest information about the love affairs of Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Rothermere and a select list of other newspaper proprietors. The crowd of reporters, in Jill's own words, "just melted away".

When Craigie became pregnant, Foot acquiesced in her having an abortion, though they were to regret the decision after their marriage when she was unable to conceive again. Craigie's next film was a documentary short, Children of the Ruins (1947), about Unesco's work to rehabilitate war-traumatised children, after which she and William MacQuitty, who had produced The Way We Live, formed their own production company, Outlook Films, to make what was to prove Craigie's only fictional feature film as a director, Blue Scar (1949). The story of a miner's daughter who, after winning a music scholarship, rejects her miner boyfriend and moves with a scathingly depicted "smart set", it was largely filmed in the mining valleys of South Wales, mixing professional actors with amateurs. With the British film industry facing a crisis, and Del Giudice ousted, financing was elusive. Craigie and MacQuitty raised the budget themselves with the help of friends, and converted a disused Welsh cinema into a studio. The film, made with no guarantee of distribution, emerged as simplistic and uneven, displaying its director's inexperience in handling fictional drama.

The major cinema circuits refused to take it, partly because they were wary of its blatant politics, though it had its champions. Kenneth Griffith, who had a featured role, recalled recently, "It was a very serious film, and Jill Craigie is a very intelligent, remarkable woman", while the critic Andy Medhurst described it as "startling and fascinating" in being "a British film that is consciously political, avowedly socialist". Craigie herself later called the film "amateurish". After directing a documentary, To be a Woman (1951), which strongly argued the case for equal pay for women, Craigie became increasingly disheartened by the struggle to be both an independent film-maker and a woman. She returned to journalism, spent some time writing for the BBC, and wrote occasional film scripts. According to Norman Wisdom, Craigie wrote one of the most successful British comedies of all time, Trouble in Store (1953), though she is not credited. Wisdom told author Brian McFarlane, "Rank gave me a film written by Jill Craigie called Trouble in Store. When they told Jill I was doing the film, she didn't want her name on it.

I don't know the full story but I do know she had written the original script." Craigie was then asked by the producer John Bryan and the director Ronald Neame to adapt Mark Twain's short story "The Million Pound Note" into a feature-length film script. The 1953 film suffered from a bland, if genial, central performance by Gregory Peck, but Craigie's script provided scope for several lively supporting performances while preserving Twain's satirical undertones. For the same producer-director team Craigie scripted Windom's Way (1957) from a novel by James Ramsey Ullman about an idealistic doctor (Peter Finch) in Malaysia who is constantly frustrated in his efforts to mediate in the conflicts between workers and authorities. In 1958 Craigie suggested to Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, that she should make a film for him featuring fully realised female characters, which she considered a rarity in British films, but Ealing's glory was fading at the time and nothing came of it.

It seemed as if Craigie's work behind the camera was over, then in 1992 she unexpectedly returned to direction with a television documentary, Two Hours From London, which featured Michael Foot as its on-screen presenter. A fiercely scathing indictment of the passivity of the Western powers in the face of Serbian aggression in former Yugoslavia, it demonstrated that Craigie had lost none of her fire and humanist passions. The film was withheld from transmission by the BBC for 18 months, and then shown only in a severely cut form. Craigie was to make headline news once more when David Cesarani's biography of Arthur Koestler (Arthur Koestler: the homeless mind, 1998) revealed that she had been raped by Koestler on 4 May 1952. Koestler was house-hunting in central London at the time and rang Craigie one morning saying he wanted to go to an English pub. Foot was away broadcasting, so Craigie agreed to give Koestler a tour of Hampstead and its pubs.

He then cajoled her into taking him home for lunch, and it was while they were washing up afterwards that he grasped her hair, pulled her down, banged her head on the floor and tried to throttle her. "In the end," said Craigie, "I was overborne." Craigie decided not to report the matter to the police, explaining, Koestler was this extraordinary man, a hero who had taken on Stalin, and I was trying to make a reputation as a film-maker. I remember sitting on the front steps after he'd gone and thinking my life would fall to pieces if I went to the police. The story would be all over the front pages and it would look very bad. I'd gone on a pub crawl with him, though I'd only drunk ginger beer. Everyone would think I'd asked for it. Craigie also decided not to tell Foot when a producer friend advised her, "On no account tell Michael - he'll have to retaliate." So she simply told her husband she had had a fight. "He thought it was perfectly normal," added Craigie.

"He had this quaint idea that men were fighting for me every day." Evidence emerged later that Koestler had raped before, and Cesarani reports that Dick Crossman later told Foot and Craigie that Koestler "was a hell of a raper", adding that his own wife Zita "had a terrible time with him". Forty years later, Craigie told her husband the whole story when "I got rather drunk at a dinner party and it suddenly came out". Craigie's most cherished film project was a fictionalised drama about the suffragette movement, but it was never to be realised. Earlier this year when the Foots were interviewed by the journalist Alice Thompson, Foot teased his wife about her feminist stance, saying, "She makes me a cooked breakfast every day, and she calls herself a feminist." Commenting on their enduring marriage, Foot said, "I have my mother to thank for that. She met Jill and rang me up that night and said, `I've found the girl for you.' I said, `Fine, but she's married.' And suddenly she was free.

And we've had a rather nice time ever since."Jill Craigie, film director, producer and screenwriter: born London 7 March 1914; married 1933 Claude Begbie-Clench (one daughter; marriage dissolved), secondly Jeffrey Dell (died 1985; marriage dissolved), thirdly 1949 Michael Foot; died London 13 December 1999. More about: Jill Craigie | News | The Guardian browse all sections close Jill Craigie As film-maker, feminist and socialist, she pursued an independent life within the loving comradeship of her marriage to Michael Foot Mervyn Jones Share on Messenger Close Some people never grasped that Jill Craigie, pioneering documentary film-maker, and Jill Foot - socialist, feminist and wife of the former Labour party leader Michael Foot - were the same person. But these personalities had fused in the summer of 1945, when Craigie, who has died aged 85, set out to make a film about the reconstruction of a badly bombed city. She chose Plymouth, where Foot, a native son, was Labour candidate in the postwar general election.

She fell in love with the man she was to marry four years later. The film, The Way We Live, was a mosaic of visual sequences and interviews - with a bombed-out young couple seeking a new home, with planners, with politicians. Seeing it today, one would recognise a familiar, if unusually skilful and assured, use of the technique of countless television documentaries. But there was no television in 1945, and Craigie was ahead of her time in more than one respect, being also the first woman director in the film industry. Michael recorded that, when they first met, he could not take his eyes off her. She was, he wrote, "half Scottish and half Russian, not a tincture of English reserve in her make-up... she had the colouring of an English rose but everything else was a romantic, mysterious addition." In fact, she owed nothing but genetic inheritance to her parents, Arthur and Sonia Craigie, who were divorced when she was an infant. Born in London, her childhood had been dominated by a haphazard education at a series of inferior boarding schools. Jill was a beautiful girl who grew to be a beautiful woman, and was often irresistibly attractive to men, sometimes to her cost.

As a recent biography of Arthur Koestler revealed, she was raped in her home by the author of Darkness At Noon - at noon, in fact, when he was a lunch guest. Other friends, including Aneurin Bevan, made vigorous advances. Of her early experiences, while working in London newspaper offices, she recalled: "A young girl alone in London with no home and no family, is regarded by men - fat men, old men, unattractive men, and most of all married men - as their natural prey." Jill was only 19 when she sought refuge by marrying a sculptor, Claude Begbie-Clench. The marriage produced a daughter - later a successful photographer under the name of Julie Hamilton - but soon broke down. Then she married screenwriter Jeffrey Dell. This marriage, too, was of brief duration, but Dell worked for Alexander Korda and was able to introduce Jill to the film world, which she quickly took as her vocation. Britain in the 1930s was a scene of anarchic capitalism, which many rebels took to be on the verge of collapse, and also of pervasive philistinism.

Jill's outlook combined a rejection of crude commercialism and an aspiration to popular participation in all the arts. She became - and proclaimed herself to be throughout her life - a William Morris socialist. Her first film, Out Of Chaos (1944), evoked the work of artists during the second world war, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, who both became friends. A couple of Moore's drawings made in the shelters during the London blitz were among her most cherished possessions. From 1945, Michael Foot was MP for Plymouth-Devonport, editor of the weekly Tribune and a columnist on the Daily Herald. Jill, meanwhile, spent several months in Abergwynfy, a South Wales mining village, making her film Blue Scar (1948), about the hardships of workers in the newly nationalised coalmines. It was the start of her links with Wales, which she regarded as a more democratic and congenial society than England. Michael and Jill were decidedly a couple, but were not living together. Though she was in love with him, she cherished her independence, and her earlier experience had not made her an enthusiast for the state of matrimony.

However, there were drawbacks, as they found when they took a holiday in Nice and stayed at the same hotel. They were spotted by a journalist, and after her return to London Jill found her doorstep besieged. Michael rescued her by threatening to publish a Tribune supplement on the private lives of press proprietors. Eventually, in October 1949, they were quietly married at a register office. Michael held Devonport in the elections of 1950 and 1951, but lost it in 1955. Labour was now in opposition and soon wracked by the argument over nuclear weapons. Michael and Jill became founder members of CND and, in 1956, were on the first Aldermaston march - the film directed by Lindsay Anderson shows them picnicking on a village green. Jill spoke at CND meetings, sharing the platform on one occasion with the historian AJP Taylor, the playwright Benn Levy and myself. After Aneurin Bevan died in 1960, Michael succeeded to his seat as MP for Ebbbw Vale (later Blaenau Gwent).

Jill, whose abilities as a designer were among her skills, renovated a small house in Tredegar for weekend use. At about the same time, the Foots moved to a house in Hampstead, which they bought in a ruinous condition for £12,000. This too was given a thorough overhaul by Jill. In October 1963 the couple were driving back from Tredegar with their grandson Jason (Julie's son, then two years old and later himself a film director) when their car was involved in a crash with a lorry. Jason escaped unhurt, but Michael and Jill were thrown into the road. He was severely injured; her left hand was crushed under one of the lorry's wheels. Despite repeated operations, it was never completely restored to normal. Jill did not return to film work after this, but devoted herself to research on the women's suffrage movement in the pre-1914 years. The book she planned on the subject was never completed, but she became a recognised authority on the period. Michael, after years as a rebel, became secretary for employment in Harold Wilson's government in 1974.

There were five cabinet ministers identified as left-wingers - Foot, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle and Judith Hart - and they decided to meet weekly to debate political issues. Each minister was accompanied by their spouse, and the occasions were designated as "husband and wives' dinners" to convince civil servants - and other politicians - that they were social occasions. In fact, the discussions were serious and sometimes heated. The couples took turns to provide Sunday evening hospitality. Jill was inclined to feel that the female ministers, Castle and Hart, ignored the opinions of the women who were "just wives". She was never on easy terms with Barbara Castle, perhaps because the latter and Michael had become close friends in the 1930s, before Jill came on the scene. After Wilson's resignation in 1976, Michael became (in effect, if not officially) deputy prime minister under James Callaghan. Labour lost power in 1979 and Callaghan retired as party leader in 1980. During a dramatic weekend, Michael hesitated on whether to stand as the leftwing oppo nent to Denis Healey.

Since Jill was known for her emphatic views, she was widely thought to have pressed her husband to take up the challenge, but both always insisted that he had made up his own mind. In the event, Michael defeated Healey for the leadership, but it was the beginning of an unhappy period in Labour history, culminating in the shattering defeat of 1983. During that election campaign Jill was reported to have told a journalist that Michael would retire within a year, even if he did become prime minister. She later insisted this was an inaccurate account of an off-the-record conversation, but she was blamed for causing added difficulties in a difficult situation. Jill's best friends would never have said that prudence was her outstanding quality. When Michael handed over the Labour leadership to Neil Kinnock in 1983, the Foots were free to devote themselves to literature, film-going, dinner parties, walks on Hampstead Heath with their dogs, and everything associated with a Hampstead life. They had for years spent holidays on the Yugoslav coast and, after the outbreak of civil war in 1991, became passionate champions of Bosnia and opponents of Slobodan Milosevic.

In 1995, they embarked together on Jill's last film - a documentary about the Yugoslav conflict shown on British television - with Michael writing the commentary and Jill directing, with the assistance of her grandson Jason Lehel. Jill Craigie was known for her resolute spirit, her socialist convictions and her integrity. Over half a century, the Foot marriage was hailed as a partnership of love and comradeship. But independence as a woman was the heart of her character and the value for which she would have wished to be remembered. She is survived by Michael, her daughter Julie and four grandchildren. Sheila Whitaker writes: Jill Craigie's involvement in film began after the outbreak of the second world war, when she was commissioned by the British Council to write scripts for documentaries on Britain. In 1943, she co-wrote, with Jeffrey Dell, the feature film The Flemish Farm, a morale-boosting flagwaver in which a Belgian pilot returns home to try and retrieve his flat from under the noses of the Nazis. Her love of the arts drew her to interpreting on film what artists and architects were saying for the wider population. She did this in documentaries commissioned by Two Cities Films, with funding from J Arthur Rank.

The first, Out of Chaos, included footage of Henry Moore drawing on a white canvas, then covering it with a wash of paint that covered everything except the lines of the drawing - so that it emerged "like magic". John Davis, Rank's chief accountant, thought it was rubbish and destroyed the negative, but now clips from the film are extensively used, though in copies made from an inter-negative from an original print. The Way We Live (1946) focusses on the issues of rebuilding war-torn Plymouth, but again John Davis didn't like what he saw and sent a message to Craigie to stop shooting. She took a train to London and showed Rank himself the press clippings in which he was praised for his support of the film; he told her to continue. In 1948, Craigie formed her own production company, Outlook, with producer William MacQuitty. They and their friends raised £150,000 to fund Blue Scar, their feature film about mining. They had difficulties finding a studio, so MacQuitty converted a disused cinema in Port Talbot and the film was shot there and on location.

A dramatisation, it highlighted the rapid disillusionment of miners after nationalisation, not least for the return of Saturday working. At the time, Craigie received much media attention as a woman director struggling to have non-mainstream and documentary films shown in cinemas to general audiences. Blue Scar was only exhibited after a campaign to have it shown. Craigie then went to Pinewood for two years to write scripts. From the original novels, she produced screenplays for The Million Pound Note (1954), which she considered her best, and Windom's Way (1957), both directed by Ronald Neame, and in which she managed to smuggle progressive economic and political nuggets past Rank and John Davis. The screenplay for Norman Wisdom's first film, Trouble in Store (1953), was written by her, but she was so dismayed by what John Paddy Carstairs did with it that she had her name removed from the credits. She also worked (uncredited) with Henry Cornelius on Genevieve (1953).

In 1995, in an interview with the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematography and Theatre Union, Craigie modestly said that she considered her films rather amateurish, but that, given time, she would have made a competent director. In 1950, she had made a documentary, To Be A Woman, on the grievances of women over equal pay. It was funded by women's organisations, and inspired by the March of Time film, Teachers In America. Craigie thought that this had done more to raise the status and pay of US teachers than all the printed matter ever published.  Jill Craigie, film director, scriptwriter, socialist, born March 7 1914; died December 13 1999 To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie: Amazon.de: Carl Rollyson: Fremdsprachige Bücher Produktbeschreibungen Synopsis Written with full co-operation of Michael Foot, the former Labour party leader, to whom she was married for 50 years prior to her death in 1999, this biography of the film-maker, writer and feminist Jill Craigie is an intimate portrait of an influential and charismatic woman.

Born in 1914, Craigie had a lonely and unhappy childhood, mostly spent in a succession of boarding schools. At 19 she was married to a film technician with whom she had a daughter. But, although she would later describe her first husband as the most satisfactory of her lovers, she soon abandoned him in favour of Jeffrey Dell, a screenwriter who later became her second husband, and with whom she collaborated on a novel and film script. Craigie had many admirers and rapidly became a well-known figure in artistic and political circles in wartime London. She had by now decided that she would make a career as a documentary film-maker and soon became the first woman to establish a national reputation in the field, most notably as a result of her 1944 film, "Out of Chaos", featuring the work of Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer. During the 1945 election she was making a campaign film about housing in postwar Britain, "The Way We Live Now", in which bomb-scared Plymouth played a major role, and it was there that she met Michael Foot, and was immediately captivated.

After a four-year affair, necessarily clandestine as Foot was now an MP, the couple married in 1949. In the 60s and 70s, Craigie's ferociously protective, though often critical, support of her husband in his career as a left-wing firebrand, then a Labour minister and finally the leader of his party, often set her at odds with senior colleagues, notably Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle. But she would never have been happy to simply adopt the role of a political wife. The couple's mutual interest in literature and the arts made their Hampstead house a meeting place for artists and writers, one of whom, Arthur Koestler, it was later revealed, betrayed their friendship by raping Craigie. As the women's movement grew in strength in Britain during the 60s and 70s, Craigie became an inspirational figure for many of its leaders and an active participant in many feminist causes. Most importantly, after meeting veterans of the suffragette movement about whose struggle she hoped to make a film, she embarked upon her monumental history of the fight to win the vote, "Daughters of Dissent".

She and Foot also became regular visitors to Yugoslavia, where the dissident writer Milovan Djilas was a close friend, and her love of the country later led her to make her final film, "Two Hours from London", which documented the ordeal of the besieged city of Dubrovnik. Carl Rollyson was given access to the archive in Foot's Hampstead home, which contains Craigie's research notes, drafts of her journalism and scripts, and her correspondence with an array of major historical figures, ranging from prime ministers to writers, film-makers and artists. He interviews Craigie's daughter Julie as well as a range of her surviving friends, and Michael Foot talks with frankness about his marriage, the strains which were placed upon it by his own infidelities, and his pride in having shared the life of so remarkable a woman.

Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende Carl Rollyson has authored several biographies published by iUniverse: Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend, Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn, Marie Curie: Honesty in Science, and with Lisa Paddock: Thurgood Marshall and Emily Dickinson. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels. Kundenrezensionen All 2 entries tagged Jill Craigie, Kinoeye Sign in All 2 entries tagged Jill Craigie No other Warwick Blogs use the tag Jill Craigie on entries | View entries tagged Jill Craigie at Technorati | There are no images tagged Jill Craigie on this blog April 06, 2008 Return to British Women Directors page Introduction Jill Craigie seems to have been Britain's second woman film maker after Kay Mander and has a cinema named after her at Plymouth University. This is the city where she made her post-war planning film The Way We live (1946).

As well as being a film maker and screenwriter she was also a researcher into the Suffragettes and wrote an introduction to Emeline Pankhurst's autobiography My Own Story published by Virago in 1979. Jill Craigie was also an alumni at Indiana University although they forgot to put in the fact that she was a documentary filmmaker(!): "Alumni of the Institute of Advanced Study (Academic Fellows, Distinguished Citizen Fellows and Visiting Scholars) - 1982-2007": Jill Craigie, Historian of women's movement, journalist, screenwriter. (Distinguished Citizen Fellow in September of 1991) The Way We Live was backed by Fillipo del Guidice of Two Cities films which was a brave decision backing a young woman with little experience as a filmmaker. Craigie made another film concerned with planning and post-war redevelopment in Middlesborough called Picture Paper. The only evidence I can find about this is present on the website below: Over 10,000 people saw the exhibition in one week.

The Picture Post articles stimulated a documentary film made by Jill Craigie - Picture Paper - a story of the photographer / reporter who come to Middlesbrough to see and interview the Group at work and was shown in cinemas all over the country. ( History of Max Lock Group ) A biopic of Emmeline Pankhurst an uncompleted film project Carl Rollyson author of the 2005 biography of Craigie To Be A Woman has commented upon this in the Virginia Quarterly Review of Spring 2003 which I have cited at length as it is a good example of what a film maker must overcome when trying to make documentaries about controversial figures: So influential has Sylvia's narrative become that when former Labor Party cabinet minister Barbara Castle published a short study of the Pankhursts she blithely relied on Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement without noting any of its numerous inconsistencies and biases, flaws that June Purvis identifies.

Jill Craigie (1911—1999), a lifelong student of the suffragettes, and wife of former Labor Party leader Michael Foot, was so outraged at Castle's ignorance that she called her up and threatened to "flatten her." Craigie, a staunch Socialist and Labor Party loyalist, nevertheless knew from firsthand experience how brutal Sylvia had been in her quest to superimpose her narrative of Votes for Women on the memory of her mother. In 1940, Craigie had read Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement and had been captivated by its "rich" writing. Sylvia saw history, Craigie commented, with the "eyes of an artist." But in 1943, when Craigie decided to write and direct a documentary on the suffragettes, she found herself pitted against Sylvia and other suffragettes who fought over who would act as advisor to the film and thus control the master narrative of their story. The film never got made because of this internecine warfare, and Craigie spent the next several decades of her life assembling a massive collection of material and writing a book (left incomplete at her death) that exposes how Sylvia distorted her mother's legacy.

As I will show in a forthcoming biography of Craigie, she is the missing link between West and Purvis. Craigie is partly responsible for the rediscovery and reprinting of West's work in the 1970's and is the key transitional figure who leads to Purvis' brilliant demonstration that during and after the war Emmeline Pankhurst not only did not abandon her principles, but saw the war and its aftermath as a way to implement them. Although there are many reasons why Craigie did not complete her epic work (a substantial manuscript of over 200,000 well-polished words), one consideration surely is the massive criticism she would have endured in her own party for putting one of Britain's Socialist icons on the rack. Sadly this kind of wrangling led to the film about Emmeline Pankhurst never being made. Below are a list of relevant links following a Google search down to page 20. I have now ordered the biography of her by Rollyson which should enable a deeper introduction to her role in the film world to be written. In the meantime there are a range of useful links provided below.

Filmography Two Hours from London (1995) [Self funded Documentary screened on BBC2] To Be a Woman (1951) Jill Craigie There is an interview of Jill Craigie avaible from the UEA BECTU website but you will need to have formal access Bibliography Macnab, Geoffrey (1993). J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-07272-7 . Rollyson, Carl (2005). To Be A Woman: The Life Of Jill Craigie. Aurum Press. ISBN 1-85410-935-9 . Dr Gwenno Ffrancon published ‘The same old firm dressed up in a new suit’: Blue Scar (Craigie, 1949) and the portrayal of the nationalisation of the coal industry in Media History. This article examines how a film, Blue Scar, made in 1949 by Jill Craigie, the filmmaker, feminist and wife of Michael Foot, portrays the changes brought about by nationalisation in the South Wales coalfield in the late 1940s. Entiknap, Leo.

2001. Postwar Urban Redevelopment, the British Film industry and The Way We Live. In Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice Tony eds. Cinema and The City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell Leo Entiknap's PhD thesis is available including work on Cragie's film The Way We Live can be downloaded here. Two articles may be downloaded without cost from Women's History Review , Volume 9 Issue 1 2000 on Jill Craigie. One by June Purvis and the other by Ursual Owen. Jill Craigie (1911–1999), 06/04/08, Kinoeye Return to British Women Directors page Introduction Jill Craigie seems to have been Britain's second woman film maker after Kay Mander and has a cinema named after her at Plymouth University. This is the city where she made her post-war planning film The Way We live (1946). As well as being a film maker and screenwriter she was also a researcher into the Suffragettes and wrote an introduction to Emeline Pankhurst's autobiography My Own Story published by Virago in 1979.

Jill Craigie was also an alumni at Indiana University although they forgot to put in the fact that she was a documentary filmmaker(!): "Alumni of the Institute of Advanced Study (Academic Fellows, Distinguished Citizen Fellows and Visiting Scholars) - 1982-2007": Jill Craigie, Historian of women's movement, journalist, screenwriter. (Distinguished Citizen Fellow in September of 1991) The Way We Live was backed by Fillipo del Guidice of Two Cities films which was a brave decision backing a young woman with little experience as a filmmaker. Craigie made another film concerned with planning and post-war redevelopment in Middlesborough called Picture Paper. The only evidence I can find about this is present on the website below: Over 10,000 people saw the exhibition in one week. The Picture Post articles stimulated a documentary film made by Jill Craigie - Picture Paper - a story of the photographer / reporter who come to Middlesbrough to see and interview the Group at work and was shown in cinemas all over the country.

( History of Max Lock Group ) A biopic of Emmeline Pankhurst an uncompleted film project Carl Rollyson author of the 2005 biography of Craigie To Be A Woman has commented upon this in the Virginia Quarterly Review of Spring 2003 which I have cited at length as it is a good example of what a film maker must overcome when trying to make documentaries about controversial figures: So influential has Sylvia's narrative become that when former Labor Party cabinet minister Barbara Castle published a short study of the Pankhursts she blithely relied on Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement without noting any of its numerous inconsistencies and biases, flaws that June Purvis identifies. Jill Craigie (1911—1999), a lifelong student of the suffragettes, and wife of former Labor Party leader Michael Foot, was so outraged at Castle's ignorance that she called her up and threatened to "flatten her." Craigie, a staunch Socialist and Labor Party loyalist, nevertheless knew from firsthand experience how brutal Sylvia had been in her quest to superimpose her narrative of Votes for Women on the memory of her mother.

In 1940, Craigie had read Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement and had been captivated by its "rich" writing. Sylvia saw history, Craigie commented, with the "eyes of an artist." But in 1943, when Craigie decided to write and direct a documentary on the suffragettes, she found herself pitted against Sylvia and other suffragettes who fought over who would act as advisor to the film and thus control the master narrative of their story. The film never got made because of this internecine warfare, and Craigie spent the next several decades of her life assembling a massive collection of material and writing a book (left incomplete at her death) that exposes how Sylvia distorted her mother's legacy. As I will show in a forthcoming biography of Craigie, she is the missing link between West and Purvis. Craigie is partly responsible for the rediscovery and reprinting of West's work in the 1970's and is the key transitional figure who leads to Purvis' brilliant demonstration that during and after the war Emmeline Pankhurst not only did not abandon her principles, but saw the war and its aftermath as a way to implement them.

Although there are many reasons why Craigie did not complete her epic work (a substantial manuscript of over 200,000 well-polished words), one consideration surely is the massive criticism she would have endured in her own party for putting one of Britain's Socialist icons on the rack. Sadly this kind of wrangling led to the film about Emmeline Pankhurst never being made. Below are a list of relevant links following a Google search down to page 20. I have now ordered the biography of her by Rollyson which should enable a deeper introduction to her role in the film world to be written. In the meantime there are a range of useful links provided below. Filmography Two Hours from London (1995) [Self funded Documentary screened on BBC2] To Be a Woman (1951) Jill Craigie There is an interview of Jill Craigie avaible from the UEA BECTU website but you will need to have formal access Bibliography Macnab, Geoffrey (1993). J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-07272-7 . Rollyson, Carl (2005).

To Be A Woman: The Life Of Jill Craigie. Aurum Press. ISBN 1-85410-935-9 . Dr Gwenno Ffrancon published ‘The same old firm dressed up in a new suit’: Blue Scar (Craigie, 1949) and the portrayal of the nationalisation of the coal industry in Media History. This article examines how a film, Blue Scar, made in 1949 by Jill Craigie, the filmmaker, feminist and wife of Michael Foot, portrays the changes brought about by nationalisation in the South Wales coalfield in the late 1940s. Entiknap, Leo. 2001. Postwar Urban Redevelopment, the British Film industry and The Way We Live. In Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice Tony eds. Cinema and The City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell Leo Entiknap's PhD thesis is available including work on Cragie's film The Way We Live can be downloaded here. Two articles may be downloaded without cost from Women's History Review , Volume 9 Issue 1 2000 on Jill Craigie.

One by June Purvis and the other by Ursual Owen. Jill Craigie dies at 85 | UK news | The Guardian Jill Craigie dies at 85 Share on Messenger Close Jill Craigie, the pioneering film director and wife of the former Labour party leader Michael Foot, has died after a long illness, it was announced yesterday. She was 85. She had been in and out of hospital for several months, supported by her devoted husband. She married him in 1949 when he was MP for Devonport. Last night, Baroness Barbara Castle, their friend and leftwing ally for 50 years, recalled that the couple had been "desperately in love. And it has lasted all this time". Ms Craigie was Mr Foot's impassioned supporter throughout his political career, and modest about her own achievements as an actress and writer, authority on feminism, and film-maker. She was Britain's first female film director, making acclaimed documentaries about "real lives" in the 1940s. As late as 1995 the Foots sank their savings into her film about the west's failures in Bosnia, shown on BBC TV as Two Hours from London.

Ms Craigie died in the Royal Free hospital near her Hampstead home on Monday night. "She had been ill for some time and a fall this summer exacerbated her heart condition," a hospital statement said. Tony Blair led tributes to the woman whose loyalty to the Labour cause remained unflinching, despite the different ideological path the party followed after 1983 when Mr Foot lost heavily to Margaret Thatcher. "This is devastating news for Jill's many friends but above all for Michael, who was totally devoted to her." Michael Foot 'had three love affairs' with two of his secretaries and an Indian journalist, a new biography claims | Daily Mail Online comments He was renowned as a politician of the utmost dignity and integrity. But just three weeks after Michael Foot's death, a previously unthinkable side of the former Labour leader has emerged. The Left-wing intellectual had affairs with two of his secretaries and an Indian journalist, a new biography claims. Foot enjoyed a 20-year relationship with Elizabeth Thomas, a friend of his feminist film-maker wife Jill Craigie. A second secretary shared liaisons with him during Labour Party conferences.

Elizabeth Thomas in 1958, during her 20-year affair with Michael Foot who described her as a 'fine woman' who his wife knew 'quite well' But the greatest threat to his marriage appears to have come from his adultery with the BBC's Leila Pasha. Miss Craigie is said to have confronted her husband after discovering 'pornographic letters' from the reporter, and told her daughter she feared Foot would not give up the relationship with 'that wretched woman'. Carl Rollyson discovered the affairs after being given access to papers and diaries while researching an earlier biography of Miss Craigie. He said he questioned the politician about them a year after his wife's death in 1999. Journalist Leila Pasha was the greatest threat to his marriage He told the Mail on Sunday: 'When I asked if he had committed adultery, he just stared into space, lost in thought, and I stared at the floor. I timed the pause: four minutes. 'Then he finally took a deep breath and blurted it out.

He said there had been "two or three women" and he felt he had to be truthful about them.' Foot, right, had a relationship with married Cambridge graduate Mrs Thomas, his secretary at socialist newspaper Tribune, from 1949 to 1971. He described her as a 'fine woman' who his wife knew 'quite well' and suspected was sleeping with him. But she never confronted him over her. Mrs Thomas went on to become Foot's adviser at Westminster and they remained close friends until his death. Feminist film-maker Jill Craigie, who died in 1999 Now 90, she said: 'We had quite a close association at Tribune. We sometimes stayed after everybody else had gone and I sat on his knee. You can imagine sometimes things happened.' But asked if she found him attractive, she said: 'Not particularly, no. He wasn't really.' Of his next mistress, who was also married, Foot told Mr Rollyson: 'We had a sexual relationship… She's now happily married.

Michael Foot always insisted that his wife was his great love What she said to her husband about our relationship, I don't quite know really, because I never asked her.' Foot's third mistress, Miss Pasha, was born and raised in Africa to Indian parents and moved to London to pursue her career. They met when she interviewed him in 1969. Foot told Mr Rollyson that the affair 'didn't last all that long but I must say I was absolutely taken by it'. When his wife found explicit letters from Miss Pasha among Foot's papers in 1971, she told him he had to choose between them. She wrote to Julie Hamilton, her daughter from her first marriage, saying: 'I have a horrible feeling that Michael does not love me enough to give up this girl. My God, how I love him! Too much, far too much.' Foot broke off the affair and always insisted that his wife was his great love, Mr Rollyson says in his forthcoming book, A Private Life of Michael Foot. But according to Miss Craigie, Miss Pasha begged Foot for money with 'rather more than a hint of blackmail'.

He gave her cash and Miss Craigie also wrote a cheque, telling her daughter: 'I have had a nasty message from that wretched woman again… I wish to God she would jump in a lake.' Foot also told Mr Rollyson: 'I thought people could be in love with two women at the same time.' To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie: Amazon.es: Carl Rollyson: Libros en idiomas extranjeros Libros en idiomas extranjeros EUR 24,57 Precio final del producto Elige envÃ­os GRATIS mÃ¡s rÃ¡pidos con Amazon Premium o elige envÃ­o GRATIS en 4-5 dÃ­as No disponible temporalmente. Puedes comprarlo ya y te lo enviaremos cuando estÃ© en stock. RecibirÃ¡s un e-mail con la fecha de entrega estimada en cuanto tengamos mÃ¡s informaciÃ³n. El cobro a tu cuenta se realizarÃ¡ sÃ³lo cuando se envÃ­e el producto. Vendido y enviado por Amazon. Se puede envolver para regalo.

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To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie (InglÃ©s) Tapa dura – mar 2005 de DescripciÃ³n del producto Reseña del editor Written with full co-operation of Michael Foot, the former Labour party leader, to whom she was married for 50 years prior to her death in 1999, this biography of the film-maker, writer and feminist Jill Craigie is an intimate portrait of an influential and charismatic woman. Born in 1914, Craigie had a lonely and unhappy childhood, mostly spent in a succession of boarding schools. At 19 she was married to a film technician with whom she had a daughter. But, although she would later describe her first husband as the most satisfactory of her lovers, she soon abandoned him in favour of Jeffrey Dell, a screenwriter who later became her second husband, and with whom she collaborated on a novel and film script. Craigie had many admirers and rapidly became a well-known figure in artistic and political circles in wartime London.

She had by now decided that she would make a career as a documentary film-maker and soon became the first woman to establish a national reputation in the field, most notably as a result of her 1944 film, "Out of Chaos", featuring the work of Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer. During the 1945 election she was making a campaign film about housing in postwar Britain, "The Way We Live Now", in which bomb-scared Plymouth played a major role, and it was there that she met Michael Foot, and was immediately captivated. After a four-year affair, necessarily clandestine as Foot was now an MP, the couple married in 1949. In the 60s and 70s, Craigie's ferociously protective, though often critical, support of her husband in his career as a left-wing firebrand, then a Labour minister and finally the leader of his party, often set her at odds with senior colleagues, notably Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle. But she would never have been happy to simply adopt the role of a political wife.

The couple's mutual interest in literature and the arts made their Hampstead house a meeting place for artists and writers, one of whom, Arthur Koestler, it was later revealed, betrayed their friendship by raping Craigie. As the women's movement grew in strength in Britain during the 60s and 70s, Craigie became an inspirational figure for many of its leaders and an active participant in many feminist causes. Most importantly, after meeting veterans of the suffragette movement about whose struggle she hoped to make a film, she embarked upon her monumental history of the fight to win the vote, "Daughters of Dissent". She and Foot also became regular visitors to Yugoslavia, where the dissident writer Milovan Djilas was a close friend, and her love of the country later led her to make her final film, "Two Hours from London", which documented the ordeal of the besieged city of Dubrovnik. Carl Rollyson was given access to the archive in Foot's Hampstead home, which contains Craigie's research notes, drafts of her journalism and scripts, and her correspondence with an array of major historical figures, ranging from prime ministers to writers, film-makers and artists.

He interviews Craigie's daughter Julie as well as a range of her surviving friends, and Michael Foot talks with frankness about his marriage, the strains which were placed upon it by his own infidelities, and his pride in having shared the life of so remarkable a woman. No es necesario ningÃºn dispositivo Kindle. DescÃ¡rgate una de las apps de Kindle gratuitas para comenzar a leer libros Kindle en tu smartphone, tablet u ordenador. Apple

Question: Film-maker and screenwriter Jill Craigie was the wife of which politician?
Answer: Michael Foot