At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from the mouth of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the play in which Rudman once directed Dustin Hoffman to great acclaim. The author is also Felicity Kendal’s other half, making him a figure of envy for much of male Middle England.
A tall ‘Texan Jew’ who went to Oxford, Rudman has quite a CV. He started at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where with the approval of the theatre’s chairman Nicholas Fairbairn he put on drugs and porno plays. An award-winning stint at the Hampstead Theatre followed, then a spell at the National Theatre. He later ran the Chichester Festival Theatre before going to the Sheffield Crucible.
He’s also freelanced on Broadway and in the West End and one of his theories is that the way creatives behave is usually determined by profit.
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