Colin Clark (b. 9 October 1932 in London) is a British writer and filmmaker who has specialised in films for cinema and television about the arts. He is the son of the art historian Lord Clark of Saltwood (Sir Kenneth Clark), and the younger brother of the Conservative politician and military historian Alan Clark, with whom he was not always on good terms.[1]
He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. From 1951 to 1953 he did National Service as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force.[2]
Colin Clark's first job on leaving university was as an assistant director on the film The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, an experience Clark later turned into two books, one a set of diaries[3] (a TV documentary version of which was also made in 2004)[4] and the other a memoir of his relationship with Monroe.[5]
He went on to work with Olivier on The Entertainer, Titus Andronicus and other British stage productions.[6]
He then worked for Granada Television in Manchester, initially as a floor manager and later as assistant to studio boss Denis Forman and then head of design. Moving to New York in 1960, he was involved in setting up a PBS educational television station, Channel 13 New Jersey, with the aim of covering arts and culture in the New York region. He made a series of programmes called Art: New York, and recorded live concerts by Thelonius Monk and Sonny Rollins.[7]
Clark returned to Britain in 1965 to work for Associated TeleVision (ATV), where he made many documentary films, including series with Angus Wilson and Bernard Levin, as well as directing a series on art appreciation presented by his father, Sir Kenneth Clark, who had fallen out with the BBC, which had produced his earlier programmes including Civilisation.[8] After leaving ATV in 1971 to work as an independent film producer, he made further cultural documentary films for various commercial sponsors and for the Getty Museum as well as a film in which Alastair Cooke interviewed Prince Charles.[9] Although much of this work was for the American market, he ran the operation partly from London because costs there were lower and because, he said, there was little American tradition or experience of making documentary films.[10]
He retired from filmmaking in 1987 to write books.
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