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Scion of one of the great theatrical dynastic families, Robert Fox, who has died aged 73, was a producer on stage and screen over a period of 50 years. He started out as an apprentice stage manager at the Royal Court theatre in London in the early 1970s and soon made telling creative relationships with the elite of British actors and writers.
His crowning glory was, well, The Crown (2016-23), the Netflix television blockbuster series on which he was an executive producer alongside his British counterparts Stephen Daldry and Matthew Byam Shaw.
The series, written by Peter Morgan, sprang from Fox’s association as producer on Morgan’s stage play The Audience (2013), directed by Daldry and starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II.
That play anatomised, fictionally, the private weekly meetings between the monarch and a succession of prime ministers from her accession to 2013 – Winston Churchill to David Cameron – wittily conceived with a satirical edge and magical sleight-of-hand onstage royal costume changes.
Fox had first collaborated with Morgan on his 2006 play Frost/Nixon, based on the sensational 1977 television interviews, directed by Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse and then the Gielgud, starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon. Fox took the production to Broadway, where he was by now an established player.
There was a further developing nexus of creativity with Daldry and the playwright David Hare, the director/writer Richard Eyre, and the actors Maggie Smith, Rupert Everett and Judi Dench.
And in his first film as a producer, A Month By the Lake (1995), written and directed by John Irvin, based on a story by HE Bates, he delivered a delightful comedy of romantic entanglements by Lake Como in 1937, with performances by his elder brother, Edward, Vanessa Redgrave, his former mother-in-law (her daughter Natasha Richardson was his second wife) and Uma Thurman.
One of his earliest stage hits was Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1982), about embryo spies at a 1930s public school, with a cast of unknowns headed by Kenneth Branagh, Everett and Colin Firth (followed by a film he co-produced in 1984), and one of his later stage collaborations was with David Bowie in Lazarus (2015), a poignant musical continuation of the role Bowie played in the Nicholas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and premiered with Bowie’s songs in New York just five weeks before the singer died. He presented this extraordinary show, written by Enda Walsh and directed by Ivo van Hove, in 2016 in a pop-up theatre at King’s Cross.
Fox was born in Cuckfield, West Sussex, the third son – his elder brothers were the actors Edward and James Fox – of the leading agent and producer Robin Fox and his wife, Angela (nee Worthington; Angela’s mother, “Glitters” Worthington, was the daughter of the playwright Frederick Lonsdale and the inspiration for Noël Coward’s song beseeching Mrs Worthington not to put her daughter on the stage).
He was educated at Harrow school in the mid-1960s and while there made a stage debut at the Royal Court in the premiere of Christopher Hampton’s When Did You Last See My Mother (1966).
Soon aware that acting was not for him, he worked as a runner in the film industry before returning to the Court in 1971 as an assistant stage manager/director, and in 1973 joining the very smart and unconventional producer Michael White.
Affable, charming, highly intelligent, casually well dressed and always funny and popular, Fox worked with White for seven years on such smash hit shows as the homegrown The Rocky Horror Show (1973), and the London premieres of Broadway musicals A Chorus Line (1976, at Drury Lane) and Annie (1978, Victoria Palace).
He formed his own production company in 1980 and the folowing year launched with two scabrously funny, unexpected West End hits: Mike Leigh’s Goose-Pimples at the Garrick starring Antony Sher, Marion Bailey and Jim Broadbent; and John Wells’s Anyone for Denis? at the Whitehall, with Angela Thorne as Margaret Thatcher and brother Edward also in the cast. The former was an astute transfer from the Hampstead theatre, the latter a brutally satirical broadside in the only West End theatre that would give him house room.
He was up and running, and followed with Another Country and a splendid Charles Sturridge production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Queen’s (now the Sondheim) in 1985, with Redgrave as Arkadina, John Hurt as Trigorin and Richardson – with whom he promptly fell in love – as Nina (a role her mother had played on the same stage in 1964).
His Broadway connections with the all-powerful Shubert organisation were reinforced by his involvement with the Abba composers/Tim Rice “cold war” musical Chess (1986), directed by Trevor Nunn, and his production of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1987), directed by Michael Blakemore, starring Smith and Margaret Tyzack – both of whom won Tony awards in New York.
Smith was a family friend (Robin Fox had at one point been her agent) and he became her producer of choice on such hits as The Importance of Being Earnest (1993) at the Aldwych (though Maggie was unhappy in Nicholas Hytner’s production; when asked would she take it to Broadway, she replied that she wouldn’t take it to Woking) and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women at Wyndham’s in 1994, as well as his A Delicate Balance, with Eileen Atkins, at the Haymarket in 1997.
Smith and Hytner were reconciled by Fox in his production of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van (1999), Hytner going on to direct the film. Admired as much by Dench as he was by Smith, Fox produced both actors in Hare’s The Breath of Life (2002) playing, respectively, the wife and lover of a radical lawyer who has decamped to Seattle with a younger model.
Dench starred in two of his very best films as producer, both directed by Richard Eyre: Iris (2001), charting an increasingly poignant love story between Iris Murdoch and Jim Broadbent’s John Bayley as she retreats into the blank fogginess of dementia; and Notes on a Scandal (2006), adapted by Patrick Marber from a novel by Zoë Heller, in which Dench’s school teacher, secretly smitten by a new young staff member (Cate Blanchett), commits an act of denigrating betrayal on discovering that the new arrival, unhappily married to an older man, has embarked on an affair with an underage pupil.
Other notable movies included The Hours (2002), scripted by Hare from a novel by Michael Cunningham, directed by Daldry, ingeniously interweaving the lives of three women in different timescales, focusing on Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) writing Mrs Dalloway and taking her own life in 1941, with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.
He also produced The Happy Prince (2018), written, directed and starring Everett as Oscar Wilde at the end of his life, hedonistically defiant but finally locked in a sardonic battle on his deathbed with some tacky hotel wallpaper: “One of us has to go.”
His last West End production was Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen (2015, Royal Court then Wyndham’s), a brilliant black comedy set in Oldham in 1965 in the aftermath of the abolition of the death penalty. And his last Broadway co-production was Good Night, and Good Luck (2025) at the Winter Garden starring George Clooney as the legendary television journalist Ed Murrow calling the shots against Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s witch-hunt of liberal writers and artists. This was a timely revival of an earlier 2005 television show.
Fox, whose godfather was the actor Robert Morley, was married three times, the first two marriages ending in divorce: from 1975 to 1990 to the casting director Celestia Sporborg; from 1990 to 1994 to Richardson, who fell in love with the actor Liam Neeson when Robert took a Young Vic production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie to New York in 1993; and in 1996 to the journalist and Vogue editor Fiona Golfar.
He is survived by Golfar and the three children – Sam, Louisa and Chloe – from his first marriage, and two – Joe and Molly – from his third, by his brothers, Edward and James, and by eight grandchildren.
