David Leland, writer-director who had success with Personal Services and Wish You Were Here – obituary

David Leland, ho has died aged 82, was an acclaimed writer and director who trained as an actor before reinventing himself as another of the British film industry’s quietly reliable storytellers.

The pivot resulted in two fondly recalled 1987 films inspired by stories told to Leland by the defiantly unabashed suburban madam Cynthia Payne. Personal Services was written by Leland, directed by Terry Jones, and featured an ebullient Julie Walters in the lead; Wish You Were Here was directed by Leland himself, with a breakthrough performance from Emily Lloyd as Lydia, a surrogate for the teenage Payne.

Both films came about by chance, as Leland later explained: “I was in my agent Jenne Casarotto’s office one day and she said, ‘Look, you’ll have to go now, I’ve got Cynthia coming in,’ and I said, ‘Cynthia who?’ and she said, ‘Cynthia Payne’, and I said, ‘Who’s Cynthia Payne?’… I was introduced to Cynthia in passing as I left and she immediately said, ‘Oh look, here’s a shy one – they’re always the worst.’ And I thought: wonderful! This woman is a class act!”

The projects were several years in the making. Leland, a jobbing actor whose credits included episodes of Callan (1969) and Van der Valk (1972), had started working as a director and talent liaison at Sheffield’s emergent Crucible Theatre, where Jones and Michael Palin came to premiere their short plays Their Finest Hours in 1976. (Leland would later appear as the hapless football manager in the “Golden Gordon” episode of Palin’s Ripping Yarns.)

Among Leland’s Crucible discoveries was a then-unknown writer from Prestwich, one Victoria Wood: “She literally wrote the plot of this musical, Talent, on the back on an envelope and shoved it through my door and I said, ‘Right, you’re on. We’ve got to have this number of characters, you’ve got to perform and you’ve got to play the piano and I want it by such-and-such a date’, and she said, ‘Right’, and went away and delivered it bang on the dot.”

Around the same time, he began developing his own material as a screenwriter. He was among the last beneficiaries of the BBC’s Play for Today strand, forming an easy alliance with the rigorous, socially minded director Alan Clarke: Clarke’s Psy-Warriors (1981), about a brutal Army training drill, started as a play Leland had tested at the Crucible.

The pair defected to ITV for Made in Britain (1982), featuring an electrifying performance from the young Tim Roth as a rootless skinhead; it won the Prix Italia in 1984. It was the first of a loose quartet of TV films – R.H.I.N.O., Birth of a Nation and Flying into the Wind (all 1983) – in which Leland grappled with the British education system. (The four were issued on DVD under the umbrella title Tales Out of School.)

Having announced himself on the small screen, Leland then took a co-writer credit on Mona Lisa (1986), a contemporary London gangster saga that, elevated by Neil Jordan’s atmospheric direction, landed Oscar nominations and a Bafta win for Bob Hoskins. Here, as elsewhere in his career, Leland saw his material being reshaped by others.

Yet where the Jones-directed Personal Services tottered towards farce, Wish You Were Here saw Leland striking a more measured tone, balancing crowd-pleasing cheek (crystallised by its heroine’s catchphrase-taunt “Up yer bum!”) with scenes in which Lydia is nudged – and sometimes jostled roughly – towards formative experience.

In a rave review, Roger Ebert described Wish You Were Here as “a comedy with an angry undertone… Because the film sometimes doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, it’s always interesting: we see a girl whistling on her way to possible tragedy.” Having beguiled the critics, it became a box-office hit and won Leland the Bafta for Best Original Screenplay.

In 2011 Leland reflected on how his feature debut represented the culmination of a decade’s training: “By the time we got to Wish You Were Here, I’d really gone round the camera in practically every hat. I’d acted in front of cameras, I’d been on set as a writer, I’d directed in the theatre – and the Crucible is an arena theatre, so you are directing in 360 degrees, like in film. It really was time for me to direct a film.”

David Hugh Leland was born in Cambridge on April 20 1941 and educated at Soham Grammar School. He trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and in 1963 joined the breakaway group of staff and students who formed the Drama Centre London; he headed north after a friend, fellow actor Peter James, was appointed to run the Crucible (which Leland described as “amazing… like the Starship Enterprise dropped into the middle of an industrial city”).

After Wish You Were Here, Leland briefly ventured to the US, although the Joe Ezsterhas-scripted black comedy Checking Out (1988), with Jeff Daniels as an everyman confronted by his own mortality, found few admirers. (Ebert lamented “Leland seems to have lost his bearings”.)

He returned home to make The Big Man (1990), an adaptation of William McIlvanney’s novel about a miner (Liam Neeson) who turns to the fight game to make ends meet during the strikes of 1983. Despite a softened ending imposed by its producers, the Weinsteins, it was met with respectful reviews: Time Out’s Geoff Andrew called it “tough, taut and intelligently critical of the man’s world it depicts”.

Leland returned to the theatre the following year, directing A Tribute to the Blues Brothers upon its West End debut. And he returned to FilmFour, who’d backed Wish You Were Here, for The Land Girls (1998), a genial WW2 anecdote starring Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Catherine McCormack. His final film was the sex comedy Virgin Territory (2007), an ill-fated attempt to update The Decameron.

A skilled banjo player, Leland found ways to occupy himself between projects. A close association with George Harrison’s HandMade Films – producers of Mona Lisa and Checking Out – led to gigs directing videos for Harrison’s supergroup the Travelling Wilburys; after the Beatle’s death, he directed the documentary Concert for George (2003), which won the Grammy for Best Long-Form Music Video.

He returned to television in 2001, directing the “Bastogne” episode of HBO’s Band of Brothers, and being amazed by the production’s scale: “There was a tank battle and I said, ‘How many tanks will I be able to have for that sequence?’ and I was taken to this huge hangar, and they said, ‘Here is every working tank in Europe – is that enough?’” And he rejoined Neil Jordan on Showtime’s The Borgias (2011-2013), writing and directing the final episodes of the show’s second season.

Often, though, he found himself writing projects that subsequently had their funding slashed or pulled altogether, a frustration he bore with characteristic good humour: “It swallows you up really. I was writing all manner of stuff for American studios, and earning a very good living doing so, and it took a long time to realise that [having scripts produced] doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of what you’re writing. It’s all down to the package they can put together – what actors you can get and so on – and that determines what is made, even if the script is crap.”

He is survived by his third wife Sabrina Canale, and five children; he was previously married to Stephanie Lenz and Ann Speight.

David Leland, born April 20 1941, died December 24 2023

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.