Obituary: Don Sharp - Director whose range encompassed The Thirty-Nine Steps to Hammer horrors

DON Sharp came from a generation when it was possible to work your way to the top in the film business doing pretty much anything and everything. A child actor in Australia, he came to Britain in the late 1940s, made several films with Hammer and Christopher Lee and directed the third and most faithful adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps in south-west Scotland.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 version of John Buchan’s classic spy yarn was set largely in the Highlands and shot mainly in the studio in London. The 1959 remake took Hitchcock as its template. Sharp, however, went back to the original novel for his film in 1978. It had a period setting, before the First World War. The eponymous steps were actual, physical steps, not a secret organisation, as Hitchcock would have it. And Sharp shot in the area that had provided the setting in the original story.

He filmed at various locations in the south-west, including Castlemilk House, near Lockerbie; Morton Castle, near Thornhill; the village of Durisdeer, the Forest of Ae and the Duke of Buccleuch’s Drumlanrig estate, although the railway scenes were done on the Severn Valley Railway. However, Sharp departed from Buchan’s storyline for the climax. His denouement was much more cinematic with the hero, played by Robert Powell, famously dangling from the hands of Big Ben.

Donald Herman Sharp was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1921 according to military records, though reference sources invariably give his year of birth as 1922. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Australian Air Force and with the coming of the peace he did as many of his countrymen did and headed for England.

Initially, he found work mainly as an actor. He had a major role in Ha’penny Breeze, a 1950 B-movie that he co-wrote and which mixed yachting and romance. He played an officer in The Cruel Sea, but seemed to be slipping down cast lists, rather than rising up them.

By the mid-1950s he had moved behind the camera. He served as second unit director on the classic war film Carve Her Name with Pride and he directed films for the Children’s Film Foundation and episodes of the police TV series Ghost Squad.

Sharp first tapped into the developing youth music scene with the 1958 film The Golden Disc and he married one of the actresses, Mary Steele.

He subsequently worked with Tommy Steele, one of Britain’s biggest pop stars, on It’s All Happening. It was 1963 and the whole British scene was exploding with the emergence of the Beatles, the Stones and their contemporaries, and Sharp was well-qualified to help the new stars realise their big-screen ambitions. He chose instead to throw in his lot with Hammer Films, which had reinvigorated the horror genre in the late 1950s, but was seeing shrinking returns on rising budgets.

Hammer was keen to hire Sharp because he had a reputation of delivering value for money, though he had reputedly never even watched a horror film before. He immersed himself in the genre and made an immediate impact with the first, highly atmospheric scene of The Kiss of the Vampire, in which a spade is driven straight through the lid of a coffin, eliciting a spine-tingling scream and flow of crimson.

The Kiss of the Vampire was made with a largely unfamiliar (ie cheap) cast. Sharp did get the chance to work with one of Hammer’s biggest stars on The Devil-Ship Pirates. It was the first of six films he would make with Christopher Lee over a 15-year period from the mid-1960s to late 1970s.

Sharp directed Lee in Rasputin the Mad Monk and as the old oriental villain Fu Manchu in The Face of Fu Manchu and its sequel, The Brides of Fu Manchu. They also worked together on Dark Places and finally on Bear Island, an adaptation of one of the novels by the best-selling Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean, about lost Nazi gold. It was shot on location in Alaska and Canada and also starred Donald Sutherland and Vanessa Redgrave.

Unusually for a director who was finding regular employment in films, Sharp also continued to work in television, directing episodes of The Avengers and The Champions; a memorable version of The Four Feathers, with Powell, Simon Ward, Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour; an adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, starring Jenny Seagrove; and Tusitala, a mini-series about Robert Louis Stevenson on Samoa.

Sharp also continued his relationship with Hammer on the small screen, directing one of the stories in the much-loved Hammer House of Horror series. His last credit was for another Taylor Bradford mini-series, Act of Will, in 1989. In his memoirs Tall, Dark and Gruesome, Lee paid the director the compliment of saying Sharp “knew as much as anybody about directing”. BRIAN PENDREIGH