Anthony Page, the prolific British stage, film and TV director who won a Tony Award for his 1997 Broadway production of A Doll’s House and was twice Emmy-nominated for acclaimed TV movies in the 1970s, died September 11 at a London residential care home. He was 90.
Page’s death has been confirmed by press representative Jo Allan to British news outlets.
The director of the 1977 Oscar-nominated film I Never Promised You A Rose Garden starring Kathleen Quinlan as a young woman struggling with schizophrenia, Page was Emmy nominated for his direction of two high-profile TV-movies in the mid-1970s: Pueblo (1973), which chronicled the capture of an American spy ship in North Korea, and 1975’s The Missiles Of October, a drama starring Martin Sheen and William Devane about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Both projects won multiple Emmy Awards.
On Broadway, Page is best remembered for directing a string of acclaimed and starry productions during the 1990s and 2000s, beginning with his Tony-nominated A Doll’s House starring Janet McTeer (herself a Tony nominee for the role). In 2003 he directed a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, Ned Beatty and Margo Martindale, and two years later directed a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that starred Kathleen Turner as Martha opposite Bill Irwin’s George.
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Page made his final Broadway appearance in 2009 with a revival of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, starring Irwin, John Goodman, John Glover and Nathan Lane.
Born Anthony Frederick Montague Page on September 21, 1935, in Bangalore, British India, Page attended Oxford before relocating to New York to study with famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner. By the mid-1960s he had begun a long association with London’s Royal Court Theatre where he directed and, from 1969 to 1972, served as co-artistic director.
Page made his Broadway debut with 1965’s Inadmissible Evidence, a John Osborne play starring, among others, Nicol Williamson. He returned to Broadway in 1983 with a revival of Shaw’s Heartbreak House starring Philip Bosco, Rosemary Harris, Rex Harrison and Amy Irving. Page would not return to Broadway until his string of star-driven revivals began with A Doll’s House in ’97.
For the screen, Page directed, among others, 1979’s The Lady Vanishes starring Cybill Shepherd, Elliott Gould and Angela Lansbury. Television credits include 1981’s The Patricia Neal Story and Bill starring Mickey Rooney as a mentally disabled man; the 1983 sequel Bill: On His Own; 1988’s Scandal In A Small Town starring Raquel Welch; and, in 1994, seven episodes of the British mini-series Middlemarch.
His final credit was the 2008 British TV film My Zinc Bed, written by playwright David Hare and starring Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine.
Page is survived by his husband and partner of 40 years Kenneth Butler.
