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The ebullient and engaging West End producer Paul Elliott, who has died aged 84, was one of a group of young producers who emerged at the end of the 1960s, encouraged by their predecessors and mentors such as Peter Bridge, John Gale and Michael Codron.
Other young pretenders were Cameron Mackintosh, Bill Kenwright and Duncan Weldon. The last of these teamed with Elliott in 1970 to produce a superb West End debut (originating at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford) with JB Priestley’s When We Are Married at the Strand (now the Novello) starring Peggy Mount and the veteran, very large comedian Fred Emney as the bibulous photographer.
Emney was prone to ad-lib new lines. When asked if he had lost any weight recently, he replied, “Indeed I have. I’ve given up mint sauce.” No wonder Elliott went on to become, for many years, the leading and most successful pantomime producer in the land, also writing or directing about 500 of them himself.
His stable of regular stars included Les Dawson, Danny La Rue, Lily Savage (Paul O’Grady), Lesley Joseph and his favourite dame, the Scottish star Allan Stewart, with whom he worked for 11 years. His first panto, in 1968, was Goldilocks and the Three Bears at the New theatre, Hull, starring Ronnie Hilton and another notable dame, George Lacy.
Goldilocks was his favourite panto, he said, “because it’s the same as Cinderella only the Buttons character gets the girl”. He also liked the rarely seen Sinbad the Sailor, but was distraught during an interval at the Wimbledon theatre in the 1982-83 season when Ken Dodd had extended the first act to well over two hours. “He’s not sticking to my script!” he screamed at a few critics happily wallowing in the Ken Dodd show.
His panto pre-eminence was challenged about a decade ago by the rising new company he had joined, Nick Thomas and Jon Conway’s Qdos, and he withdrew as an eminence grise. It was an unhappy departure, but he gracefully elided into an advisory position with both Thomas and Conway and the rising new producer Michael Harrison.
By then he had been reunited with Weldon after they had gone their separate ways. Weldon, who died in 2019, had concentrated on star-laden classics at the Chichester Festival theatre and the Haymarket in London, while Elliott veered towards Ray Cooney, juke-box musicals and star-laden classics at the Phoenix theatre – Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who became a great friend, in The Pleasure of His Company, a stage version of the Fred Astaire movie, and Lee Remick in William Inge’s Bus Stop, both in 1976.
His biggest hits, without Weldon, were Cooney’s Run for Your Wife (1983) about a bigamous taxi-driver dashing between south London homes in Wimbledon and Streatham, with Richard Briers and Bernard Cribbins, which ran in the West End for nine years, then all over the world; and Buddy (1989), a musical celebration of Buddy Holly at the Victoria Palace, then the Strand, which ran for 13.
The third great Elliott show was Jolson (1995), based on the Michael Freedland biography of Al Jolson, also at the Victoria Palace, which boasted a sensational performance by another of Elliott’s panto stable, Brian Conley, a definitive Buttons. There was a stunning design coup when Conley burst through a stage-wide screen showing Larry Parks in the black and white Jolson Story movie to make a live comeback in the gilded deco extravagance of Radio City in New York.
Elliott was born in Bournemouth, the only child of Lewis Elliott, a greengrocer and taxi driver, and his wife Sybil (nee Wyatt), a florist. He was educated at Bournemouth school and left to work as a fridge salesman in a department store. His wage of £5 a week was slightly improved by joining the local Palace Court theatre in 1958 – he fancied the leading lady – where he acted in Agatha Christie plays.
He moved on in 1959 to weekly rep in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where he played golf with David Hemmings, also starting out, and fell in love with another actor, Janet Waldron, with whom he lived for the next 11 years.
In 1961, he joined the cast of Dixon of Dock Green on BBC TV as a police cadet, stayed for two seasons and made a lifelong friend and colleague in Peter Byrne, who played the square-jawed DS Andy Crawford. Together, they formed E&B productions in 1964, which stayed afloat until 2000, though Byrne had long since departed.
He was mentored as an actor, stage manager and ultimately producer by Bridge, who improved on an offer of an understudy role at the Oxford Playhouse with a one-line walk-on (“Water, water, we’ve found water …”) in The Lizard on the Rock, starring Siân Phillips at the Phoenix in 1962.
Up and running as a producer in 1964, he ran two seasons at the Little theatre in Rhyl, where Roy Plomley, begetter of Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio, put up some money – twice – on condition they included two of his plays. Then came a return to Bournemouth to run the Palace Court theatre, where the company included Bill Maynard, Ann Sidney (Miss World, 1964), Pat Kirkwood, Charlie Chester and Dave King.
Those are dim and distant days now, but there always remained a creative link with the repertory and vaudeville theatre of the past that Elliott and others exploited to commercial advantage and success.
This was activated when Elliott first met Weldon in 1967, arranging a tour of Alan Ayckbourn’s first hit, Relatively Speaking, starring Evelyn Laye in the Celia Johnson role. Weldon was meanwhile cultivating working relationships with the new Billingham Forum and new Yvonne Arnaud, and this led to their West End breakthrough in 1970.
Bridging the generation gap, they were soon producing (in 1973) Gladys Cooper and Joan Greenwood in Enid Bagnold’s shimmering The Chalk Garden and, in the same year, Peter Wyngarde and Sally Ann Howes in a decent revival of The King and I at the Adelphi.
Elliott was by now married (in 1971) to the musical theatre actor Jenny Logan, and Weldon to another musical starlet, Janet Mahoney, and the quartet became a regular fixture at West End first nights. They shared an office in Ivor Novello’s old flat at the top of the Strand in the Aldwych and lined the walls with posters of flops and triumphs.
One of the triggers of the falling out with Qdos was Elliott’s acquisition – without consulting his fellow board members – of the rights to Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets, which had started out in Belfast and arrived at the Tricycle (now the Kiln) in Kilburn 2000.
He transformed this modest two-hander, brilliantly performed by Conleth Hill and Sean Campion as Irish film extras dreaming of fame and glory, into a West End and Broadway smash hit. It remained one of his proudest achievements, and rightly so.
He and Logan divorced in 1986, and he married the actor Linda Hayden in 1987, having cast her a few years previously in a notable flop, Underground, starring Raymond Burr (Perry Mason and Ironside on TV), at the Prince of Wales – this was a low rent, unlikely tube train version of Murder on the Orient Express.
More positively, Elliott had a long-lasting creative partnership with Ed and David Mirvish in their big Canadian theatres, and a huge international hit with Eric Sykes and Jimmy Edwards in Big Bad Mouse (1972), by Philip King and Falkland Cary.
He built more kudos after Stones with high-class presentations of Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 2001 at the Albery (now the Noël Coward) and of Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood in a brilliant, blood-soaked Macbeth, directed by Rupert Goold in the West End and New York, starting out at Chichester’s Minerva studio and Goold’s Almeida in Islington in 2007.
Elliott was given an honorary degree by Arts University Bournemouth in 2015 and a special Olivier award in 2018. In that same year, he published some rollicking “random memoirs” titled Keeping My Balls in the Air.
He is survived by Linda, their two children, Haydn and Laura Jane, and by a son, Simon, from his first marriage.
