Anthony Page, the British director whose work moved between major stages, films and television movies across more than four decades, died September 11 at a London residential care home. He was 90.
Page’s death was confirmed by press representative Jo Allan to British news outlets.
Across a wide-ranging career, Page earned some of his highest-profile recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. He won a Tony Award for his 1997 Broadway production of A Doll’s House and received two Emmy nominations in the 1970s for directing television movies that went on to win multiple Emmy Awards.
Those Emmy-nominated projects were Pueblo, the 1973 TV movie chronicling the capture of an American spy ship in North Korea, and The Missiles of October, the 1975 drama about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis starring Martin Sheen and William Devane.
Page also directed the 1977 Oscar-nominated film I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, starring Kathleen Quinlan as a young woman struggling with schizophrenia.
A Broadway Career Built on Major Revivals
On Broadway, Page became closely associated with a series of prominent revivals featuring notable casts, particularly from the late 1990s through the 2000s.
His Broadway debut came in 1965 with John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, starring, among others, Nicol Williamson. Page later returned to Broadway in 1983 with a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, whose cast included Philip Bosco, Rosemary Harris, Rex Harrison and Amy Irving.
His next major Broadway chapter began with A Doll’s House in 1997. The production starred Janet McTeer, who was herself a Tony nominee for the role, and became one of the defining stage successes associated with Page’s name.
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. Two years later, he staged Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Kathleen Turner as Martha opposite Bill Irwin as George.
Page’s final Broadway appearance came in 2009 with a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, starring Irwin, John Goodman, John Glover and Nathan Lane.
From Royal Court to Film and Television
Born Anthony Frederick Montague Page on September 21, 1935, in Bangalore, British India, Page attended Oxford before moving to New York to study with acting teacher Sanford Meisner.
By the mid-1960s, he had begun a long association with London’s Royal Court Theatre. He directed there and, from 1969 to 1972, served as co-artistic director.
Page’s screen work included the 1979 film The Lady Vanishes, starring Cybill Shepherd, Elliott Gould and Angela Lansbury. His television credits also included 1981’s The Patricia Neal Story and Bill, the latter starring Mickey Rooney as a mentally disabled man.
He went on to direct the 1983 sequel Bill: On His Own, the 1988 TV film Scandal in a Small Town starring Raquel Welch, and seven episodes of the 1994 British mini-series Middlemarch.
His final credited work 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.