British director Clive Donner was born in West Hampstead, London,
England. By age 18 he was already working in the film business, as an
office clerk at Denham Studios. He eventually became an editor and then
graduated to the director's chair. After making a series of TV
commercials, he made his theatrical directorial debut with
Am Rande der Unterwelt (1957). In the
1960s he went from smaller, harder-edged black-and-white films to more
commercial, "now" films, such as
...unterm Holderbusch (1968),
Was gibt's Neues, Pussy? (1965)
and the disastrous flop
Alfred der Große - Bezwinger der Wikinger (1969). He
worked only sporadically in features after that--two more bombs,
Die nackte Bombe (1980) and
Charlie Chan und der Fluch der Drachenkönigin (1981)
didn't help matters--and he returned, for the most part, to television.
Among his best work there were a critically acclaimed filming of
Frederic Raphael's thriller
Rogue Male (1976) and a
faithful and well-received adaptation of
Charles Dickens' famous novel,
Eine Weihnachtsgeschichte (1984)
with George C. Scott as Scrooge.
Unfortunately, that was followed by the notorious
Merlin und das Schwert (1985),
a bizarre, convoluted and disjointed mess about which the less said,
the better.
