Antony Thomas

Antony Thomas (b. 1940) is primarily known as a director of television documentaries.

Biography

Though born in Calcutta on 26 July 1940 to Robert Edward Thomas and his wife Margaret Sheila Edmunds, Antony Rhys Thomas came to South Africa as a six-year-old and was raised in what was then Natal. He subsequently attended Sherborne School in Dorset between 1954 and 1959. He obtained a degree at Cambridge University, but moonlighted as an apprentice editor in London. In 1962 he returned to South Africa to visit his family and in 1966 he was given a role in Emil Nofal’s film Wild Season (1967), acting opposite Janis Reinhardt and with Gert van den Bergh as his father. However, before that he directed four documentary shorts for the Department of Information, amongst them Anatomy of Apartheid (1964), which attempted to provide a rational explanation for the government’s policy of racial segregation. This was followed by River of Diamonds (1965), The Light Ahead (1966) and Vision of Gold (1968). In September 1967 it was announced that he would be leaving South Africa to take up an appointment with BBC Television.

In Great Britain he made at least two television documentaries with a South African background. These were The Gold Run (1969), made for Yorkshire Television, and a film about Cecil John Rhodes entitled A Touch of Churchill, A Touch of Hitler (1971), written by and starring the Welsh actor Kenneth Griffith. In 1972 this was followed by another film for Griffith, namely Hang Up Your Brightest Colours, about Michael Collins, a major figure in the Irish struggle for independence from Britain (the film was not shown on British television until 1994.) The cinematographer on both these films was Grenville Middleton. Thomas’s research on the Rhodes film probably stood him in good stead when, in 1996, he wrote the screenplay for a BBC mini-series on the life of Rhodes, with Martin Shaw in the leading role and David Drury as director. The series also featured many South African actors in supporting roles. Thomas himself had a small role as Henry Labouchère, a radical MP in the House of Commons who was a member of the South Africa Committee and an opponent of the Second Boer War.

The production of his early documentaries had exposed him to some of the realities of the government’s apartheid policy, which were further confirmed during his early years in England. In 1977 this resulted in a three-part series entitled The South African Experience, made for ATV. The individual episodes were The Search for Sandra Laing, Six Days in Soweto and Working for Britain. He had been given permission to film in South Africa on the presumption that the programmes would mirror his early work for the Department of Information, but instead they were extremely critical of the government’s policies, as well as of Britain’s economic complicity. Though they were praised by the British critics, the Department was outraged, with Dr. Eschel Rhoodie branding him “a TV mercenary peddling his wares to those willing the buy them.” The sugar company of Tate & Lyle threatened legal action over Working for Britain, resulting in a protracted row covered by the press. In spite of this, the programme was eventually shown on television on 14 December 1977.

Preceding The South African Experience, Thomas had produced two other trilogies, The Japanese Experience (1973) and The Arab Experience (1975), as well as programmes on a range of other topics. In 1980 his Death of a Princess (1980) aroused the anger of the Saudi government and it became a political issue in various countries. The programme was a dramatized reconstruction of an actual event, namely the public execution of a princess who was said to have transgressed the country’s moral code. Another film that received a lot of publicity was The Tank Man (2006), about the lone, unidentified Chinese man who confronted the tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989. Also controversial was For Neda (2010), the story of a young Iranian woman who, the previous year, had been shot during pro-democracy protests in Tehran. Most of his films were widely shown and received many awards, including a Grierson Award, a BAFTA and an Emmy. In 2016 he retired from active filmmaking and in 2022 his book In the Line of Fire: Personal Memories of a Documentary Filmmaker was published.