Norman Spencer, David Lean Collaborator and ‘Vanishing Point’ Producer, Dies at 110

Norman Spencer, the British producer, production manager and screenwriter who worked alongside famed director David Lean on films including Blithe Spirit, Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, has died. He was 110.

Spencer died Aug. 16 in Wimbledon three days after his birthday, the European Supercentenarian Organisation announced.

Apart from Lean, Spencer produced Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn; Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), the car chase movie that starred Barry Newman; and Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), starring Denzel Washington.

Spencer was Lean’s unit manager on the ghost comedy Blithe Spirit (1945), based on the Noël Coward play, and served as his production manager on his adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948).

He produced Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1949) and the Hepburn-starring, Venice-set Summertime (1955); worked on a rewrite of the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and suggested “The Colonel Bogey March” could be whistled instead of sung; and was in charge of the epic battle scenes in Morocco on Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Spencer also co-wrote and co-produced Hobson’s Choice (1954) and talked Lean out of hiring Roger Livesey for the lead and casting Charles Laughton instead.

“I’d seen Charles Laughton, a big Hollywood name, and thought he’d be better: a huge personality, a little fat, commandful. He was a Yorkshireman, too, though the accent was immaterial,” he told The Guardian in 2014.

He reflected on his remarkable career in an expansive 1999 interview for the British Entertainment History Project.

Born in London on Aug. 13, 1914, and raised in Essex, Norman Leslie Spencer worked as an extra on such films as 1937’s Splinters in the Air and Knight Without Armour and was a gofer at Denham Film Studios when he first met Lean, an editor there, in 1942.

“We took a shine to each other — we were both mad about film and started going to the pictures together with our wives,” he recalled. They would “haunt bookshops, and he’d say, ‘Within nine feet of us is a wonderful idea for a film.’” (Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and they had two children.)

Spencer got a big break as third assistant director on Lean’s debut as a director, the war film In Which We Serve (1942), starring co-director Coward and John Mills. He also had a small part as an officer in the movie, which, by the way, marked Attenborough’s acting debut.

Spencer, Lean, Coward and filmmaker Ronald Neame launched Cineguild Productions in 1944.

Spencer also was Lean’s production manager on Madeleine (1950) — which starred the director’s newlywed wife, Ann Todd — and an associate producer on The Sound Barrier (1952); in between, he produced the Dirk Bogarde thriller Blackmailed (1951).

For the British Entertainment History Project, Spencer noted that Peter O’Toole, who had recently had a nose job, was hired for Lawrence of Arabia only after Albert Finney had turned it down and Marlon Brando had signed on, only to have money issues get in the way.

In Morocco, Spencer held meetings with King Hassan and was tasked with wrangling 800 camels and riders and 600 other men to play the foot soldiers for the film’s awe-inspiring battle scenes.

When someone realized that the camel riders filmed earlier in Jordan rode differently than the ones Spencer had hired, “We had to have a thousand camel saddles made, and we had to teach the camel riders in Morocco to ride in the way they ride in Jordan, which was a huge undertaking,” he noted. “But it had to be done, because the scenes had to match.”

For three years, he worked as an executive assistant under Elmo Williams, in charge of European production for Fox, and worked on such features as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), The Blue Max (1966) and Modesty Blaise (1966).

Spencer said the film that gave him the most satisfaction was Fox’s Vanishing Point, because he took that one from start — the idea for the movie had been written on a scrap of paper — to finish, and it was an unexpected box office hit.