Richard Marquand

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Richard Marquand died on the 4th of September 1987, five days after a stroke felled him at his home in Penshurst. He was 49. His last film was still waiting to be released. To most people who knew his name, he was the director of Return of the Jedi, the film that closed the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983. But the path that took a Welsh boy from Cardiff to the most watched science fiction saga of the twentieth century ran through BBC documentaries, Cambridge tutorials with E. M. Forster, Mandarin lessons during National Service, and a screenplay about a Victorian orphan girl in Mid Wales that Hollywood tried to move to the Rocky Mountains. How does a television documentary maker end up steering the most anticipated film in the world? And what happens to a career cut short at the moment it finally arrived?

• 2. Roots and Formation

  ›

  Marquand was born on the 22nd of September 1937 in Llanishen, Cardiff, Wales. His father, Hilary Marquand, was an economist and Labour MP who served as Minister of Pensions and later Minister of Health under Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Politics ran through the family; his older brother David Marquand also served as a Labour MP.

  For his education, Marquand moved through institutions that shaped his sensibility in distinct ways. Emanuel School in London was followed by the University of Aix-Marseille in France, then King's College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages. One of his tutors at Cambridge was E. M. Forster, the novelist then in his eighties. Margaret Drabble was a friend of his at Cambridge as well, a connection he would later draw on for his television work.

  National Service took him in an unexpected direction. Marquand studied Mandarin and was posted to Hong Kong, where he also read the news on English language Hong Kong Television. The experience of working in broadcasting abroad planted a seed that would grow into a career in factual film.

• 3. The Documentary Years

  ›

  By late 1966, Marquand had begun directing television documentaries for the BBC. The breadth of his output over the following decade was striking. He worked with the celebrated foreign correspondent James Cameron on Cameron Country, a long-running series for BBC television. He also collaborated with John Pilger on a series of films for ITV.

  A 1968 edition of One Pair of Eyes gave Marquand the chance to revisit a Cambridge connection: the subject was novelist Margaret Drabble, his old friend. The 1971-1972 series Search for the Nile, which covered two episodes of his directing, became one of his more substantial factual projects of that period.

  Children's television also drew his attention. The 1977 film Big Henry and the Polka Dot Kid won an Emmy Award. Two years later, in 1979, he directed Birth of the Beatles, a biographical television movie in which he deliberately incorporated the documentary techniques he had been refining over more than a decade of factual work. That instinct for grounding drama in observed reality would later catch the eye of George Lucas.

• 4. The Leap to Features

  ›

  Eye of the Needle, the 1981 drama feature, became the film that changed the course of Marquand's career. George Lucas later described it directly: "Eye of the Needle was the film I'd seen that he had done that impressed me the most, it was really nicely done and had a lot of energy and suspense." Lucas also credited Marquand's skill with actors as a deciding factor.

  On the strength of that film, Lucas hired Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi, the third film in the original Star Wars trilogy. It was released in 1983. Marquand even appeared in the film as a cameo, playing a character listed as Major Marquand, and provided the voice for the droid character EV-9D9.

  The film earned Marquand a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1984. After Jedi, he directed Jagged Edge in 1985, a courtroom thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close. His final film, Hearts of Fire, in which he also served as producer and which starred Bob Dylan, was released posthumously after his death in 1987.

• 5. The Welsh Western

  ›

  While Marquand's Hollywood career was building, he was also nurturing a project that never made it to the screen. In the late 1970s, working at the South Wales branch of Pinewood Studios, he wrote a screenplay he described as a Welsh western. The story followed a young orphan girl in Victorian Mid Wales who enlists two local men to help her seek revenge against those who killed her father.

  Marquand used to tell the story to his children during holidays at the family's cottage near Tregaron. According to a 2014 interview with his son James in Wales Online, he pitched the screenplay to Hollywood producers who expressed genuine interest. The offer fell apart over location. The producers insisted the story be moved to the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Marquand declined.

  The decision to hold that line cost him a produced film but preserved the story's Welsh identity. In the same 2014 interview, James Marquand said he was interested in adapting his father's screenplay himself, keeping it in the country where his father had imagined it.

• 6. Family and Final Days

  ›

  Marquand married twice. His first marriage, in 1960, was to screenwriter Josephine Elwyn-Jones, the daughter of Labour MP Elwyn Jones and author and illustrator Pearl Binder. They had two children, Hannah Rachel and James Elwyn, before divorcing in 1970. James Marquand followed his father into film, working as an editor and director.

  In 1981, Marquand married fellow film director Carol Bell, with whom he had two more children, Sam Adair and Molly Joyce. Outside of work, he was a fan of Liverpool Football Club.

  On the 30th of August 1987, he suffered a stroke at his home in Penshurst. He was taken to Kent and Sussex Hospital in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Five days later, on the 4th of September 1987, he died at the age of 49. Hearts of Fire, his final film, was released after his death. He had also written a story that would eventually be developed posthumously; Nowhere to Run, released in 1993, carries his name as story writer.