My film family’s greatest hits

Petrifying: Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Directed by Ronald Neame, it features Gareth, his grandson

Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star My film family’s greatest hits

At he Royal Command Performance of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, my late grandfather Ronald Neame (1911-2010) was admonished by the Duke of Edinburgh.

As the film’s director, he had been instructed only hours earlier to cut a scene deemed to be unsuitable. The scene in question involved the actor Robert Stephens, in the role of art master Teddy Lloyd, and three of Miss Brodie’s girls admiring a sketch of a nude male torso. It wasn’t the image that was thought inappropriate, but Stephens’s dialogue which involved the words ‘pectoral muscles’.

‘Do you think we’re all children?’ barked the Duke as he passed my grandfather in the receiving line.

Brodie is one of the most celebrated films in Ronnie Neame’s long and illustrious career as a director, producer, writer and cinematographer. In one of her most memorable performances, Maggie Smith received her first Academy Award.

The film also marked my first foray into showbusiness. Another featured painting was of Teddy’s family: to expose his obsession with Jean Brodie, his wife and five children all resemble her. The children are depicted in descending order of age with me at the end sitting on a potty. As the producer of Downton Abbey, I have a working connection with Dame Maggie that continues over half a century later.

But the Neame film dynasty doesn’t begin with Ronnie Neame; rather with his parents. His mother was Ivy Close (1890-1968), the Edwardian beauty queen who won the Daily Mirror’s 1908 competition to find the world’s most

beautiful woman. Stuart Elwin ‘Senny’ Neame was the youngest and certainly the most successful photographer in London (‘If it’s a Neame, it’s you at your best’) and had been engaged to photograph the 25 finalists. They married shortly afterwards.

Then, as now, modelling led to acting – while Senny tried his hand at the new art of cinema, directing his wife in several films, such as the eight-minute-long The Lady of Shalott in 1912. He shot on location and had a daylight studio in Walton-on-Thames, where he built the sets himself, on a revolving platform so that the sun would always come from the same direction.

In a career move that still happens over a century later, Ivy went to make films in America, but before Tinseltown became dominant. Joining the Kalem Company in Jacksonville, Florida, she worked alongside Oliver Hardy – known to her as ‘Babe’. It is her leading role in Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece La Roue that placed her firmly in the archives for ever. On a DVD, I have watched a great-grandmother I never knew as a movie star of her day. At a total running time of seven hours, it is quite a commitment.

When Senny was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1923, in his thirties, money became tight. Young Ronnie was removed from school in his early teens and sent to work. He arrived at Elstree in 1927, soon working for the young director Alfred Hitchcock, already considered a genius and already corpulent. Following his father’s footsteps into cinematography, Ronnie was on the set of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie, which famously started production as a silent film.

Learning his craft on ‘quota quickies’, by the Second World War Neame was one of the leading cinematographers in Britain, with credits such as Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), as well as several George Formby pictures, extraordinarily popular at that time.

Noël Coward was encouraged to make films to help the war effort. He surrounded himself with the most talented young filmmakers of the time: editor David Lean and cinematographer Ronald Neame. Their first collaboration was one of Britain’s most acclaimed war films, In Which We Serve (1942). It was filmed in a tank at Denham Studios, with steel to build HMS Torrin made possible by an intervention by Louis Mountbatten. Coward had to abandon ship, diving into said tank (‘There’s dysentery with every mouthful’).

Ronnie went on to photograph This Happy Breed (1944) and Blithe Spirit (1945), with Coward, who became his mentor and godfather to my father, Christopher.

Sent by Arthur Rank on a fact-finding mission to Hollywood before the end of the war, Ronnie really was asked by a studio boss – like something out of Mad Men – if he wanted a blonde or a brunette secretary. While learning all about the latest Hollywood techniques, he was not averse to a spot of industrial espionage. Britain was unable to afford the state-of-the art Mitchell camera, which had revolutionised film production. Discovering that it had not been patented outside the US, Ronnie carefully disassembled one and copied it on paper, to have it manufactured when he returned home.

Forming their production company Cineguild, Lean and Neame next made three extraordinary films in a row, films which to this day dominate the lists of greatest British films of all time. Ronnie produced Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946). Ronnie also co-wrote both screenplays, for which he got Academy Award nominations. This was followed by Oliver Twist (1948).

As a director, Ronald Neame delivered some of the most beloved films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Card (1952), The Million Pound Note (1953), The Horse’s Mouth (1958), The Man Who Never Was (1956) and his personal favourite, Tunes of Glory (1960). Alec Guinness and John Mills feature prominently in most of these films, and Ronnie always told me that everything he knew about acting came from these two stars. He worked in musicals too, directing Scrooge (1970) and I Could Go On Singing (1963), which was Judy Garland’s remarkable final performance.

Most of this was before my time, though. When my grandmother took me to the Odeon Leicester Square, aged six, to see his Poseidon Adventure (1972), they were already separated.

Family album (from top): In Which We Serve, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, I Could Go On Singing, This Sporting Life, Monsignor Quixote, Downton Abbey the movie

He was living in Beverly Hills, where he spent the last 40 years of his life.

The first of a genre of 1970s disaster movies, Poseidon was quite a remarkable spectacle at the time. Visual effects not yet having been invented, everything – including the entire set turning upside down – had to be done for real and in camera on the sound stage. Here his years of training as a cinematographer were invaluable. Poseidon remained one of the highest-grossing films ever until Steven Spielberg came along at the end of the decade.

Although Ronnie was a rather distant figure to us until we were old enough to travel to Los Angeles to see him, my father, Christopher (1942-2011), had followed him into film. He started out in the camera department on films such as This Sporting Life (1963). During my earliest years, he worked on a slew of horror films with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee at Hammer.

As a producer, he was influential in bringing film techniques to TV drama, which had previously been a wobbly-set sort of affair, made in multi-camera studios. At Euston Films, he started to make TV series like films: on location, with film directors and with a single film camera. This is still the way we work to this day, and there is very little difference between how one makes a movie and how one makes a high-end drama.

He formed a strong producing partnership with John Hawkesworth making TV series such as Danger UXB (1979). I would often accompany my father on set and was lucky enough to go to Kenya aged 13 during the summer holidays to see the filming of The Flame Trees of Thika (1981), which starred Downton Abbey’s Dr Clarkson, David Robb.

When I wasn’t with my father on set, I would go at weekends to Elstree Studios, where Ronnie had worked decades earlier and where my stepfather had the catering business. The late 1970s and 1980s were a boom time, with many Hollywood blockbusters being shot in London because of the exchange rate. I remember going onto the stage of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and realising that a terrifying snake pit consisted of hundreds of rubber snakes and only a few real ones, brought in by a specialist.

I remember walking onto another stage that was Yoda’s planet, before the world knew who Yoda was. Oh, and I once served Brian Blessed an ice cream after his ‘Gordon’s alive’ sequence in Flash Gordon (1980).

I did feel a sense of duty in following the three generations before me. I was lucky to form a very strong relationship with my grandfather as I got older and he would always counsel me, ‘Don’t come into this stupid business.’ But I remember him being covertly delighted when I did.

The thing is that I was so familiar and at ease with this world. Conversations at mealtimes would be about actors, filmmakers or the various projects my father or my grandfather was hoping to get off the ground.

When first taught about Graham Greene at school, I said to my English master that he’d come round to our flat for bangers and mash the previous weekend. Christopher was also a screenwriter: his adaptation of Monsignor Quixote (1985) starred my grandfather’s long-standing collaborator Alec Guinness. And Greene craved old-fashioned British nosh when back home from Antibes. From then on, the same schoolmaster used to refer to him as ‘your mate Graham Greene’.

Ronnie’s death in 2010 at the age of 99 fell on the final day of shooting the first season of Downton Abbey. So he never did get to see it. I know he would have enjoyed the reference in one of the episodes to his mother, Ivy, whom two of the servants went to the cinema one night to see. My father sadly died only a year later.

In Los Angeles soon afterwards, I was the recipient of a Producers Guild of America award. As I made a brief acceptance speech, I noticed the great and the good sitting in front of me – Spielberg and Scorsese among them. I thanked director Ronald Neame and producer Christopher Neame, my mentors, without whom I would never even have been standing there.

Top: Ronald Neame with Ivy Close. Right: with Judy Garland, I Could Go On Singing (1963). Left: Monsignor Quixote (1985): Leo McKern, R Bennett, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness and Christopher Neame