The versatile British director Peter Yates has died in London, at the age of 81.
He began his career as a dubbing assistant, after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, working his way up to assistant director on films such as Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey and J Lee Thompson's Guns of Navarone.
The early 60s saw him gravitate to television, directing some episodes of The Saint and Danger Man, but his feature directorial debut was Summer Holiday, the colourfully jolly pop musical that packed Cliff Richard off to the seaside on a red London bus. The Eric Sykes vehicle One Way Pendulum, and Robbery (about the Great Train Robbery of 1963) followed, before Hollywood, Steve McQueen and Bullitt secured his place in cinema history.
*That on the streets of San Francisco came out of Yates' early experiences driving racing cars and managing Sterling Moss. The sequence constituted ten minutes of screen-time and three weeks of shooting that punished a Ford Mustang like never before, and the results were much imitated (and almost never bettered) for decades to come.
A career directing action must have been on the cards, but Yates followed-up Bullitt with the romantic drama John and Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow. His subsequent CV remained equally unpredictable, covering war films (Murphy's War), caper movies (The Hot Rock, Mother, Jugs & Speed), crime drama (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), adventure (The Deep) and fantasy (Krull). He was Oscar-nominated for the coming-of-age drama Breaking Away in 1979, and again in 1983 for The Dresser, based on Ronald Harwood's play.
His most recent work took him back to the small screen, directing TV adaptations of John Knowles' A Separate Piece and Cervantes' Don Quixote, but his final theatrical feature was, appropriately, Curtain Call in 1999. He is survived by his producer wife Virginia Pope, and by his three children.