Born in London, to Thomas, a production designer, and his wife, Nancy (nee Barker), Morahan went to Highgate school. His father originally hoped his son would become an architect, but Morahan gravitated towards acting and spent a year in weekly rep in Henley-on-Thames. In 1947 he joined the Old Vic Theatre school, It was there that he realised he had a mission to direct. He started as a floor manager at Associated Television working on a twice-weekly medical soap, Emergency-Ward 10. In 1957, he graduated to directing on TV.From 1962 to 1964 Morahan worked on the BBC’s Z-Cars and formed a close bond with John Hopkins, one of the series’ writers. In 1965 he directed, for The Wednesday Play, Hopkins’ Fable, which satirised apartheid, imagining a Britain ruled by a black minority. But the partnership with Hopkins bore even greater fruit in Talking to a Stranger, Over four 90-minute episodes, the play examined the tensions in a family from the perspective of its individual members. Morahan got brilliant performances from all his cast, including Maurice Denham, Margery Mason and Michael Bryant,and Judi Dench as the daughter,In 1967 Morahan made his debut as a theatre director with Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders for the RSC. He went on to direct David Mercer’s Flint in the West End and Pinter’s The Caretaker.He went back to the BBC to become head of plays, television, in 1972. Days of Hope, directed by Ken Loach and written by Jim Allen. That was one of the reasons Peter Hall asked Morahan to join him as deputy director at the National Theatre in 1977. Morahan directed a number of first-rate productions by Ibsen (Brand and The Wild Duck), Tolstoy (The Fruits of Enlightenment) and, most especially, George Bernard Shaw (The Philanderer, Man and Superman),While at the National, Morahan read Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and was asked by Denis Forman, chairman of Granada TV, to act as producer and co-director, along with Jim O’Brien, on the TV series that became The Jewel in the Crown.
In 1986 he directed the film Clockwise, with a screenplay by Michael Frayn, in which John Cleese as a comprehensive school head struggles to reach an annual conference. The next year, for BBC TV, he made a macabre comedy by Gray, After Pilkington, starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson,In 1989 he directed a masterly TV film of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day scripted by Pinter.
Morahan continued to work extensively in the theatre, directing Wilde and Shaw at Chichester, reviving The Caretaker with Jonathan Pryce and giving a first showing to a new adaptation of Pinter’s The Dwarfs, In 2011 he was appointed CBE.
died 7 April 2017
