Richard Northcott, colourful entrepreneur who ranged from DIY and pet food to erotic films – obituary
Richard Northcott, who has died aged 77, was a serial entrepreneur in DIY, furniture, pet food, jewellery and pubs – and for a while, a Hollywood film producer with his name attached to one of the box-office sensations of the 1980s, the erotic epic 9 ½ Weeks.
A restless dealmaker with a well-developed taste for the high life, Northcott was generally more interested in financial possibilities and strategic gambits than in the products and services his businesses offered. But after he sold his first winning venture, a chain of DIY superstores, for £20 million, he was “sitting on a boat” – the pool deck of a cruise ship – when “someone gave me the script of a film called 9 ½ Weeks and said ‘Why don’t you go and make a movie of it?’ So I bought the script and a house in Beverly Hills and started a film company.”
Eventually called Nelson Films and floated on several stock exchanges, the company also had a hand in, among other hits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers and A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson. It was “the most exciting thing I’ve done,” Northcott told a Telegraph interviewer, but the success of 9 ½ Weeks was “a complete fluke… We used to get 50 scripts a week and anyone who thinks he can pick a winner is deluded. It was pure luck that the first one worked.”
The 1986 film gained notoriety for its allegedly sadomasochistic sex scenes – involving imaginative uses of ice cubes, soft fruits and jalapeno peppers – between Kim Basinger, playing a New York art gallery employee, and Mickey Rourke as a mysterious Wall Street broker. Initially heavily edited for US release, it did better internationally in less cut versions and eventually harvested $100 million.
During the making of the film, ‘‘Basinger was just breathtaking,” Northcott recalled, explaining, “By the time it was finished, they had shot these scenes 500 times. I used to go on the set as part of my job.”
Francis Richard Northcott was born at Gosport on September 24 1946, to Vernon Northcott, who owned a chain of paint and wallpaper shops in Scotland, and his wife Joyce, née Webb – who died when Richard was a small child. Richard was educated at Blundell’s in Devon and Repton in Derbyshire before qualifying as an accountant.
When Vernon fell ill and his shops were not doing well, Richard stepped in to help but decided to close them down, investing instead in a new concept he had seen in America: the DIY superstore. Named Dodge City “for some extraordinary reason”, the first opened in Glasgow in 1974, with small high-street shops as its only competition. Hefty upfront costs were funded entirely by bank borrowings, and despite Northcott’s lack of enthusiasm for DIY as a pastime, the business went from strength to strength.
Eventually there were more than 30 Dodge City stores on out-of-town sites with vast car parks – and in 1981 he was able to sell the chain to Woolworth’s; it was rebranded as part of B&Q, which Woolworth’s had also recently acquired from its founders.
Northcott went on invest in Select, a London modelling agency with a high quotient of glamour, and to launch Brown Bear, a furniture stores group which he sold to the jeweller Gerald Ratner, who promptly traded it on to the carpet tycoon Phil (later Lord) Harris.
After the adventures of his six-year stay in Los Angeles – “a bit like the Wild West” – Northcott returned to buy a farming estate on the Hampshire-Sussex border and become chairman of Pet City, a pet supplies warehouse chain set up by former Dodge City managers.
When that business was sold for £150 million to an American buyer in 1996, he collected another stash – and moved on to take a stake in the business of the jeweller Theo Fennell, whom he had met at a golf event and who he helped to create an upmarket international brand with outlets from Dubai to Marbella and an eager following among celebrities and cash-rich Asian shoppers.
In later years he was a partner in numerous pub ventures and VQ, a 24-hour London brasserie chain.
Richard Northcott married, in 1985, Kirsten Lund, daughter of a Canadian shipping magnate – who in due course left him and subsequently married the former cricketer Mark Nicholas. He is survived by his three sons with Kirsten and the partner of his later years, Joanna Kurpiers.
Richard Northcott, born September 24 1946, died January 7 2024
