Born NY USA . Father doctor in Liberal Jewish community. A Jazz fan. Harvard University where he Directed for the University Drama group. 1955 was directing in theatre in England. Directed Opera's. Directed for CBS at Age 22 in TV. Moved to England joined Royal Court as director.At 26 directed first feature film Wages of Fear. To Pinewood on handicapped children's film.
He had a distinguished record in showing the inner workings of organisations ranging from the US Senate and the European Union to the British Communist party and British Steel, and of highlighting injustices, whether in the treatment of children in care or the destruction of our towns and cities.
His “fly-on-the-wall” style and his open and genial manner helped him win the trust of the subjects of his many films for the BBC, Granada Television, Channel 4 and ITV in a career spanning more than six decades. His interest in crime and justice led to more than 30 related programmes, including the influential In Search of Law and Order, an investigation into the treatment of young offenders in both the US and UK. His remarkable body of work led to him being the first documentary maker to be awarded a Bafta fellowship for lifetime achievement.
Born in New York, the son of Gretchen (nee Waterman) and Irving Graef, a doctor, Roger was educated at Horace Mann, a private school in the Bronx, and the progressive Putney school in Vermont, before taking a BA in English at Harvard. It was there that his career as a director was launched, albeit in the theatre. After graduating, he directed more than 20 plays in theatres on the US east coast and embarked on his television career after CBS had spotted his talent and commissioned him to direct The Seven Who Were Hanged, based on the novel by Leonid Andreyev.
An anglophile who had visited Britain in order to watch Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, he was prompted to move there permanently in the early 1960s after seeing a performance of Beyond the Fringe in London on his second night. In 1962 he directed Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment at the Royal Court and in the West End, but his theatre work soon took second place to his documentary career; he became a British citizen in 1995 and was appointed OBE in 2006.
His early TV work in Britain dealt with a variety of topics. The award-winning One of Them Is Brett (1965) was about thalidomide children and demonstrated that, despite their physical disabilities, they were as bright as anyone. In the Name of Allah, about a Muslim community filmed in Fez in Morocco in 1970, was an early indication of his wide scope of interests. His curiosity about institutions led to his explorations of governmental bodies; Inside the Brussels HQ (1975) notably featured Stanley Johnson, then working for the European Commission.
Closing Ranks, his 1988 fiction film about how the police handle accusations of violence, addressed issues that also remain just as relevant today.
While he will be best remembered for his work on criminal justice, his range was wide. His documentary production company, Films of Record, which he set up in 1979, was responsible for Julien Temple’s highly regarded Requiem for Detroit? (2010).
His 2011 BBC Panorama special, The Truth About Adoption, has been credited with the speeding up of adoption processes. Who Cares? (ITV, 2012) exposed the neglect of older people in institutions. Another Panorama special, Kids in Care (2010), and his programmes on Great Ormond Street hospital in London (2010-15) also won plaudits. Murder Blues (2005), which charted the activities of the Met police’s Operation Trident on the issue of black crime, saw him at work on more familiar territory.
Roger Graef with some of his awards in 2014. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian
He also tackled crime and the law in print, most notably through the books Talking Blues: Police in Their Own Words (1989), Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in Their Own Words (1992) and Why Restorative Justice? (2000). He wrote regularly in the media on the issues.
He was a member of the independent advisory group on race for the Met police and his involvement in leading roles for such diverse organisations as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Prisoners Abroad and the board of London Transport, for which in 1981 he co-designed the London bus map.
He was a founding board member of Channel 4, a visiting professor of media at Oxford University and chair for more than 20 years of the theatre group Complicité, whose co-founder Annabel Arden said of him: “He was as maverick as we were, he was our rock”.
He worked with Simon Jenkins on a programme that showed that Grade II listed buildings were being destroyed daily in what was meant to be Save Britain’s Heritage Year.
With Mike Dibb he made Is This the Way to Save a City? (1974) about plans to redevelop Cardiff. Last year he was the first person to attend the exhibition at the Riverside Studios of the paintings of the American prisoner Donny Johnson, the subject of Dibb’s film Painted With My Hair.
He supported Arsenal. Working with John Cleese, he directed three of the films of the Amnesty International benefits, including The Secret Policeman’s Ball (1979); With Richard Curtis he co-produced the first Comic Relief (1985) and with James Rogan he made Monty Python: The Meaning of Live (2014).
• Roger Arthur Graef, documentary maker and director, born 18 April 1936; died 2 March 2022
