William MacQuitty

William MacQuitty (born May 15, 1905 in Belfast , Northern Ireland , † February 5, 2004 in London , England ) was an Irish film producer and author .

Life

Career

William MacQuitty was born the son of the editor of The Belfast Telegraph and was a graduate of Campbell College in Belfast. At the age of 18, he began working as an apprentice at Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China , now the Standard Chartered Bank .

After a short training period in Belfast and London, he began to work in the Far East , initially in Amritsar in the Indian state of Punjab . MacQuitty also did his military service in India. In 1928 - he was currently in Lahore ( Pakistan ) - he was a co-founder of the Lahore Flying Club . MacQuitty traveled to numerous Asian countries in the years to come, including Sri Lanka , Siam , Malaya and China .

In 1939 he received news of his mother's imminent death; MacQuitty returned to Ireland after his resignation from the bank. After a short time he began working as a farmer on a farm in the province of Ulster , but he had saved enough money to study psychoanalysis with Dr. William Stekel in London. Although the course took seven years to complete, MacQuitty dropped out during the war years.

Film career

Since MacQuitty had already made an amateur film with Simple Silage and it had been approved by the British Ministry of Information , he was now given the opportunity to produce films himself. In the beginning, it was propaganda films that should give the British confidence. In Out of Chaos he portrayed the war painters Henry Moore , Stanley Spencer , Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland . In The Way We Live , which was, however, already produced in 1946, it was about the rebuilding of the German Luftwaffe destroyed city Plymouth .

After further films, in the early 1950s, in which director Muriel Box was mostly behind the camera, MacQuitty produced The Last Night of the Titanic , his most famous film, in 1958 . MacQuitty himself was a six-year-old eyewitness to the launch of the RMS Titanic in 1911. MacQuitty produced his last film in 1963 with The Informers (director: Ken Annakin ). As early as 1959 he had founded a television station with Ulster Television , which produced school television in cooperation with the Queen's University of Belfast .

writer

During a visit to Egypt , where he originally wanted to make a documentary about Charles George Gordon , he saw the Egyptian temples for the first time in his life, including the one at Abu Simbel , about which he published an illustrated book in 1965. MacQuitty began a career as a writer that would take him to over 75 nations around the world. In his book Budda , ( sic ) published in 1969, Tendzin Gyatsho , the 14th Dalai Lama , immortalized himself with a foreword. In 1971 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , the Shah of Iran , gave him a lot of money so that MacQuitty could adequately document the 2,500 birthday of his country. His most successful book, however, was Tutankhamun: The Last Journey , which went over half a million copies worldwide in 1972.

In addition to his numerous country guides and documentations, MacQuitty also wrote two books on botany . In 1967 in Irish Gardens he described the biodiversity of plants in his Irish homeland. In 1969 he worked in Great Botanical Gardens of the World with other gardens occurring in the world.

Last years

In 1991 the autobiography appeared on William MacQuitty, A Life to Remember ; the foreword was written by his good friend, the writer Arthur C. Clarke . The last book MacQuitty wrote was Survival Kit: How to Reach Ninety and Make the Most of It, published in 1996 . In 2002 MacQuitty was awarded the Lumiè re Award by the Royal Photographic Society on the grounds that MacQuitty was a phenomenon in film (a phenomenon in film) .

William MacQuitty was married and had three children with his wife, Betty.

He died in February 2004, at the age of 98.

Web links

• William MacQuitty in the Internet Movie Database (English)