Don Sharp (1921-2011)

Actor, Director, Person, Writer 0

Don Sharp (1921-2011)

Born 19 April 1921 in Hobart, Tasmania, Sharp started his entertainment career as an actor, appearing in productions staged by the Playhouse Theatre in Hobart. He later told The Midnight Writer in Fangoria magazines that he became an actor driven “by a desire not to study to become an accountant, which is what my parents wanted for me.” He was studying to become an accountant in the evenings, but the Second World War interrupted his studies, and he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, serving in Singapore. He managed to keep up his acting though, appearing in radio plays and touring with a visiting theatrical troupe from England.

After being invalided out of the Air Force (he was discharged at the rank of corporal in March 1944), he resumed his acting as part of his recuperation when he returned to Australia, touring in productions of Kiss and Tell and Arsenic and Old Lace and had a small part in Smithy in 1946, a feature film made at a time when very few feature films were being made in Australia. He now had his heart set on making films and after a tour of Japan entertaining the troops, he set sail in London in 1948. He was able to get stage work but nothing in films so with some friends, he wrote and self-financed Ha’penny Breeze in 1950.

After being laid up for two years by a bad case of tuberculosis that resulted in him having six ribs and one lung removed, he found occasional acting work in films like The Planter’s Wife (1952), Appointment in London (1953), The Cruel Sea (1953) and You Know What Sailors Are (1954) before joining Group 3, a British government sponsored project to try to nurture new film-making talent. He was hired initially as a writer, penning the script for the charming children’s film Child’s Play, released in 1954 but made a couple of years earlier, about a bunch of kids who accidentally build a small nuclear bomb. He also wrote the dramas Conflict of Wings in 1954 and The Blue Peter the following year.

He made his directorial debut with the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) production The Stolen Airliner (1955) which he also wrote, and made several documentaries, television episodes and another CFF film, The Adventures of Hal 5 (1959) before coming to the attention of Hammer Films who hired him to direct The Kiss of the Vampire (1962), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Rasputin the Mad Monk (1966). He would later return to the company to do some uncredited work on To the Devil a Daughter () and he directed an episode of the Hammer House of Horror () television series, Guardian of the Abyss.

Along the way, he also made Witchcraft (1964) with Lon Chaney Jr, Curse of the Fly (1965), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966). In the 1970s he made a couple of crowd pleasers in Puppet on a Chain (1971) and the big screen adaptation of the hit TV series Callan (1974) but a string of unmade films and the box office flop of Bear Island in 1979 saw him move into television where he pretty much stayed until the end of his career. A Woman of Substance (1985), a mini-series based on the novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford was a highlight of his later career, pulling in huge ratings. A less popular sequel, Hold the Dream, followed in 1986.

Sharp retired towards the end of the 1980s and, after a short spell in hospital, he died in 2011 at the age of 90.

Categories: Actor, Director, Person, Writer