As a child, Norman Spencer was tantalised by his parents’ talk of “moving pictures”, and would gaze perplexed at the paintings on the living-room wall. “I could not understand as a six-year-old how pictures could move,” he told the British Entertainment History Project in 1999. “I used to say to them, ‘Is it someone behind that moves things?’”
His first cinema visit at the age of nine cleared up the confusion, and ignited a passion for film that would endure for the next century. “I was hooked from that moment onwards.”
Spencer, who has died aged 110, and was believed to be the second oldest person in the UK, worked in various capacities – production manager, producer, occasionally co-writer – on some of David Lean’s finest films, including Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Summertime (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
The two men met at Denham Film Studios, in Buckinghamshire, where Spencer was a gofer and Lean an editor. “We were both mad about film and started going to the pictures together with our wives,” Spencer told the Guardian in 2014.
Their first collaboration was also Lean’s directing debut. As an assistant director on the wartime propaganda drama In Which We Serve (1942), which Lean co-directed with its writer and star, Noël Coward, Spencer’s job included organising the complicated Dunkirk sequence, featuring the 5th Battalion Coldstream Guards.
Their participation came at the insistence of the production’s technical adviser, the future Lord (Louis) Mountbatten, whose wartime exploits inspired Coward’s screenplay, and who could not abide soldiers being played by ordinary extras.
Spencer called the sequence “the hardest and most exciting work I’ve ever done in my life as an assistant director. I was absolutely worn out at the end of the day with exhaustion and excitement at the whole thing – it was marvellous.”
However, there was a terrible accident on set in the aftermath of a staged explosion. Spencer accompanied one of the injured crew members, chief electrician Jock Dymore, who later died, to hospital. “In the ambulance he was in a hysterical state of shock,” Spencer told Kevin Brownlow, author of the 1996 biography David Lean. “I remember when he was wheeled in the casualty department, the nurse opened the blanket, looked at the doctor and he shook his head. Jock died in about half an hour. He was burned away by this terrible flame … The smell of burned flesh is something I shall never forget.”
Spencer was unit manager on Lean’s film of Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945). On Oliver Twist, his tasks included finding a baby to play the hero as a newborn. Spencer phoned a GP, who told him: “You’re in luck, because I’m pregnant.” Six weeks later, her child was born, and Lean and his crew took a section of the set’s wall to her home and filmed the child at just a day old. “Since the baby was a girl, she was named Olivia,” Spencer said.
For Hobson’s Choice (1954), he had a hand in the script and helped Lean with scouting locations in Salford. “One woman asked us into her house,” Spencer recalled. “She made us a cup of tea and said, ‘Look, the wallpaper’s peeling.’ She thought we were from the council.”
Their next film, the achingly romantic Summertime, arose “because David couldn’t find a subject. This became his perennial problem. It was one of the reasons for the great gaps in his schedule. He used to get into a creatively constipated state. A million possibilities flooded through his brain but he could not select the right one.”
The producer Alexander Korda introduced Lean to Arthur Laurents’s play The Time of the Cuckoo. The director disliked it, but was drawn to the idea of a straitlaced American who visits Venice only to be taken aback by the Italians’ approach to desire.
Laurents delivered his own adaptation, which Lean and Spencer then rewrote. “The play was almost plotless, but we travelled far from the original, which was about this dumpy, middle-aged schoolmistress meeting this seedy, down-at-heel Italian,” said Spencer. “Our script became so bloody glamorous it wasn’t true.” Other writers contributed along the way, notably HE Bates, who earned a co-credit with Lean.
The film was a delight, but Spencer was not impressed by its star, Katharine Hepburn. “She was a damn good performer, but a terrible nuisance on a film … Even on the days when she wasn’t called, she’d be on set at half past seven in the morning saying, ‘Now, how do you put the film in the camera?’” Nevertheless, he worked with her again when he was an uncredited producer on Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), adapted by Gore Vidal from Tennessee Williams’s play, and also starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
It was while in Venice that Lean showed Spencer the novel that the producer Sam Spiegel had proposed as the basis for his next film: Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, set in a Japanese PoW camp in Thailand. But when Spiegel presented Lean with Carl Foreman’s screenplay, he was dismayed to find that it was a travesty of the book. “You and I are going to sit down and open the book at page one and start again,” Lean told Spencer.
This they duly did, working together for the next six weeks. It was Spencer who fielded the daily phonecalls from Spiegel to find out how the rewrite was going. Spencer was also on hand for casting meetings, including a dinner with Cary Grant, who was briefly in the running for the role of Shears, the US commander eventually played by William Holden.
Spiegel had his mind set on becoming Lean’s sole producer. “He now started trying to winkle Norman Spencer away from David by offering him films to produce,” wrote Brownlow. One of his ruses was to keep Spencer busy with a prospective project called Dangerous Silence, which was to have starred Jack Lemmon. “It came to nothing because Spiegel didn’t want it to come to anything,” said Spencer. “He just wanted to get me away from David.”
Despite this, Spencer was recruited by Spiegel as head of production in Morocco on Lawrence of Arabia. This was a logistical nightmare, beginning with two months of meetings with King Hassan II, various government ministers and other officials before Lean even arrived. Assorted illnesses and ailments befell the cast and crew once filming was underway.
“Everybody went off their heads,” said Spencer. “The heat, the conditions, the wind, the living in tents … the army officer we had attached to us as military adviser suddenly started shooting live bullets out of his tent at night. Anything he saw, he shot at. We had to have him taken away.” It was to be Spencer’s last film with Lean.
He was born in south London to Charles, an insurance broker, and Dorothy (nee Lauton), and raised in Billericay and then Leigh-on-Sea, both in Essex. Leaving school at 14, and possessing an aptitude for art, he got a job painting film posters.
At 19, he was painting murals at a dance studio when he heard some of the dancers discussing their work as film extras. Following their lead, he appeared as an extra in films such as Splinters in the Air, shot at Pinewood, and the Marlene Dietrich vehicle Knight Without Armour (both 1937). The latter brought him to Denham, where he also worked as a clapper-loader and as a stand-in for stars such as George Formby.
His run of films with Lean was nearly over before it began: he was called up to do his military service, which prevented him from working on Lean and Coward’s This Happy Breed (1944). He was later medically discharged after a bout of pneumonia.
In 1963, he joined 20th Century Fox as assistant chief of British and European production, and oversaw production schedules for films including Zorba the Greek (1964) and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965).
He produced the road movie thriller Vanishing Point (1971) and took special pride in the project, which he had packaged from initial script idea to finished film. It became a cult favourite, and is referenced multiple times in Quentin Tarantino’s own auto-based Death Proof (2007).
Spencer later co-produced Cry Freedom (1987), which dramatised the friendship between the journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and the murdered activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) in apartheid South Africa. There was a certain circularity to that project: its director Richard Attenborough had been in the cast of In Which We Serve, though his name had accidentally been omitted from the credits.
Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943. She died in 1998. He is survived by their daughters, Sally-Jane and Sue, as well as by five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
• Norman Leslie Spencer, film producer and production manager, born 13 August 1914; died 16 August 2024
• This article was amended on 19 September 2024 to correct details of surviving relatives.
