Michael Lindsay-Hogg

• 1. The Rumour at Sixteen

  ›

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg was 16 when his mother, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, reluctantly raised the subject of Orson Welles. Fitzgerald had always let him believe that Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, her husband until 1946, was his father. What she revealed that day was a persistent rumour: that Welles was the real father. She denied it. But her denial was so elaborately detailed that her son left the conversation not reassured but bewildered. Fitzgerald refused to address the subject again for the rest of her life.

  Lindsay-Hogg had been born in New York City on the 5th of May 1940. The question his mother raised and then sealed off would follow him for the rest of his life. Alongside it, he built one of the more varied careers in British and American filmmaking. How he pursued both of those threads, and where they led, shapes what follows.

  243

• 2. The Welles Question

  ›

  Orson Welles's oldest daughter, Chris, had long suspected, by the time Lindsay-Hogg came looking for answers, that they might be siblings. The two had been childhood playmates. Lindsay-Hogg had known Welles personally, having worked alongside him in the theatre and meeting him at intervals throughout Welles's life. A DNA test, initiated by Lindsay-Hogg once he learned of Chris's suspicions, produced no definitive result.

  Stuart Scheftel, an American businessman, had become Lindsay-Hogg's stepfather when he married Geraldine Fitzgerald in 1946. Lindsay-Hogg had been educated at Trinity School in New York and at Choate School in Connecticut. His early life was, in most respects, conventional. The paternity question was the fault line beneath it.

  Gloria Vanderbilt, one of Fitzgerald's closest friends, had put in writing that Fitzgerald told her Welles was the father. Lindsay-Hogg recounted this in his 2011 autobiography, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond. Vanderbilt's written account was the most direct confirmation Lindsay-Hogg had received.

  A 2015 biography of Welles by Patrick McGilligan challenged that conclusion. McGilligan argued that the timing made Welles's paternity impossible. Fitzgerald had left the United States for Ireland in May 1939. She returned in late October of that year, already pregnant. Welles, by McGilligan's account, had not travelled overseas during that period.

  Lindsay-Hogg's first film credit, as a producer's assistant on Dear Heart in 1964, came decades before any of this was written down. The career that placed him eventually in recording studios and concert halls had started quietly in a supporting role.

  24658

• 3. The Music Film Pioneer

  ›

  In 1965, Lindsay-Hogg took the director's chair on Ready Steady Go!, a British pop programme. The show put him before the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. The professional connections he formed there led directly to work directing promotional films for individual songs, a format that was still developing its visual language.

  He made promotional films for the Beatles, beginning with "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" in 1966, then "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" in 1968. For the Rolling Stones he shot "2000 Light Years from Home" in 1967, followed by "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Child of the Moon" in 1968. Camerimage, the cinematography festival, gave him a retrospective "Music Video Pioneer" award in 2012 for this body of work.

  The Rolling Stones hired him in 1968 for something larger than a promotional film. Lindsay-Hogg conceived The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a full-length television special in which the band and other musicians performed within a circus setting. The Stones were not fully satisfied with the result. The film remained unreleased for nearly three decades, finally reaching audiences in 1996.

  His work on the Rock and Roll Circus had shown he could oversee a large-scale production. The Beatles, who had worked with him on their promotional films, had something even larger in mind.

  109220

• 4. Let It Be

  ›

  The Beatles' rooftop concert was filmed in January 1969. It stood in for the live concert appearance that the project had been built to capture. Get Back, as the film was originally called, had been conceived as a television special. It would show the Beatles recording a new album and rehearsing for a live performance. After the rooftop concert, the project was shelved.

  The Beatles returned to it, and the film and album were retitled Let It Be. Both were released in 1970. Lindsay-Hogg's documentary gave audiences an unguarded look at the band working through those sessions.

  Filmmaker Peter Jackson returned to the original recordings for a 2021 documentary series called The Beatles: Get Back. His version portrayed the sessions as showing more harmony than acrimony. That was a notably different reading from the impression Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 film had left.

  His work on the BBC's Play for Today had already earned him his first BAFTA nomination, in 1974. Britain's television landscape was where he had also been building a career alongside his music work.

  20210

• 5. British Television and Film

  ›

  Brideshead Revisited, the BBC serial Lindsay-Hogg directed in 1981, won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series/Serial in 1983. The win came five years after a BAFTA nomination for Play of the Week in 1978.

  Nasty Habits, released in 1977, was a comedy that used a British convent as the setting for a satire of the Watergate scandal. The Sound of Murder, his third theatrical film, reached cinemas in 1982.

  Doctor Fischer of Geneva, in 1984, began a stretch of television adaptations. Master Harold...and the Boys followed in 1985, then As Is in 1986 and The Little Match Girl in 1987. He directed The Concert in Central Park for Simon and Garfunkel in 1982 and Neil Young in Berlin in 1983. Paul Simon, Graceland: The African Concert came in 1987. In 1985, he directed the video for Whitney Houston's single "You Give Good Love."

  His 1991 film The Object of Beauty, made for the BBC's Screen Two series, drew positive reviews. Running Mates, a comedy and drama for HBO, was broadcast in 1992. Frankie Starlight in 1995 received a more mixed reception.

  A 2000 VH1 film, Two of Us, offered a fictionalized account of the last meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The following year, Lindsay-Hogg adapted Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Waiting for Godot for the screen.

  His screen work occupied only one channel of his professional life. He had also been working in theatre since the late 1970s.

  12131514

• 6. The Stage

  ›

  Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which Lindsay-Hogg staged on Broadway in 1978, earned him a Tony Award nomination. He directed Mary Tyler Moore in that production, and the two were reportedly romantically linked at the time. He returned to the same play for a revival in 1980.

  Agnes of God followed on Broadway in 1982. The Boys of Winter arrived on Broadway in 1985. In the same year, Off-Broadway, Larry Kramer's AIDS drama The Normal Heart received its original production under Lindsay-Hogg's direction.

  Outside the theatre, his personal life during the 1970s had included a decade-long relationship with English actress Jean Marsh.

  1418220

• 7. A Life Beyond the Frame

  ›

  Lucy Mary Davies and Lindsay-Hogg married in 1967. They divorced four years later, in 1971. Lucy subsequently married photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, in 1978. Lindsay-Hogg was also romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt.

  The baronetcy of Rotherfield Hall, in East Sussex, was the title that fell to him following his father's death in 1999. He was next in line for the succession. He took no steps to establish his claim. The baronetcy is listed as dormant on the official roll.

  In 2015, after a long break from television and film, Lindsay-Hogg began directing a web series called Tinsel's Town.

  172115220