Robert Fox, a prolific British producer who came from a family steeped in the theater and whose many successes on both sides of the Atlantic included Peter Morgan’s 2013 play “The Audience,” which inspired the hit Netflix series “The Crown,” died on March 20 at his home in London. He was 73.
His wife, Fiona Golfar, said the cause was prostate cancer.
Over five decades, Mr. Fox produced, with and without partners, dozens of plays in the West End of London and on Broadway. He oversaw productions of works by Edward Albee, Martin McDonagh, David Hare and Arthur Miller, among many other playwrights. He was a favorite of the actress Maggie Smith.
“Great actors felt safe in his hands because he took the weight on his shoulders,” Mr. Hare wrote in an email. Mr. Fox produced several of Mr. Hare’s plays, including “Skylight,” “The Vertical Hour” and “Amy’s View,” for which Judi Dench won a Tony Award in 1999.
Mr. Fox had “plenty of scabrous cynicism about the world he operated in — he was excoriating about the chancers and fakes on Broadway and in the West End,” Mr. Hare added, but he had “absolutely no cynicism about the writers and actors he championed.”
Mr. Fox’s involvement in “The Audience” — about the weekly conversations that Queen Elizabeth II held with a succession of prime ministers — began over Sunday lunches in his kitchen with Mr. Morgan, a longtime friend of Ms. Golfar’s. Stephen Daldry, the play’s director, had known Mr. Fox since the early 1990s.
“‘The Audience’ was very much Robert’s baby,” Mr. Daldry, who also directed all the episodes of “The Crown,” said in an interview. “He was the cornerstone.”
Helen Mirren played Elizabeth in London in 2013 — Mr. Fox’s brother Edward had the role of Winston Churchill — and on Broadway two years later. Three actresses (Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton) portrayed the queen during the series’ six-season run on Netflix, for which Mr. Fox served as an executive producer.
“He was involved all the way, particularly in two crucial aspects: casting and editing,” Mr. Daldry added. “He had impeccable taste.”
Mr. Fox shared in six Emmy Award nominations for outstanding drama series for “The Crown.” He also won two Tonys as part of groups that included Scott Rudin, a frequent producing partner: for best play (Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” in 2009) and best revival of a play (Mr. Hare’s “Skylight,” in 2015).
Robert Michael John Fox was born on March 25, 1952, in Cuckfield, West Sussex. His father, also named Robert but known as Robin, was a theatrical agent whose clients included Paul Scofield, Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Marianne Faithfull. His mother, Angela (Worthington) Fox, was an actress.
The Foxes’ friends included Laurence Olivier and his wife, Joan Plowright, and the Redgrave family. “Because of where he came from, he was brilliant at the care and feeding of stars,” Mr. Rudin said in an interview. “The psychology of stardom was very available to him.”
Although he acted briefly, he did not follow the path of his brothers Edward and James, who both became actors. At 19, he began working as an assistant to directors at the Royal Court Theater in London, and then was hired in 1973 as an associate producer by the impresario Michael White.
Over seven years, The Guardian wrote in 2016, they “tore up the West End” with the musicals “A Chorus Line” and “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” They also produced “The Rocky Horror Show.” Mr. Fox went out on his own in 1980.
In London, his productions included Julian Mitchell’s “Another Country” (1981), based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess, which featured the West End debuts of the future stars Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rupert Everett. A revival of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” (1985) featured Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Natasha Richardson, to whom Mr. Fox was briefly married.
He also produced Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” (1987), written for Ms. Smith, and “Chess” (1986), a musical by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus that is currently having a Broadway revival.
Ms. Smith was also a star of Mr. Fox’s 1993 London production of Oscar Wilde’s satirical play “The Importance of Being Earnest” — and hated most everything about it.
In an email, Nicholas Hytner, who directed the show, recalled that Mr. Fox asked her, “Can we talk about taking this to Broadway, Maggie?” And she tartly replied, “I wouldn’t take it to Woking,” a distant outpost in England for touring shows.
“We both worked with her again a few years later on ‘The Lady in the Van,’ which she liked, but she still shunned Broadway,” Mr. Hytner added. “All the dames loved and trusted him.”
Mr. Fox’s Broadway productions included a 2003 revival of “Gypsy,” starring Bernadette Peters, and “The Boy From Oz,” staged the same year, with Hugh Jackman in his Broadway debut as the Australian entertainer Peter Allen.
Mr. Fox produced acclaimed movies as well, including “Iris” (2001), about the novelist Iris Murdoch, which starred Ms. Dench; “The Hours” (2002), about the effect of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway” on three generations of women, which Mr. Daldry directed; and “Notes on a Scandal” (2006), in which a teacher (Ms. Dench) learns of an affair between a colleague (Cate Blanchett) and a student.
Starting in the 1970s, Mr. Fox cultivated a friendship with David Bowie, and Mr. Bowie would occasionally show up at Mr. Fox’s opening nights; in 2005, he brought Lou Reed to the Broadway opening of Mr. McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.”
Mr. Fox wanted to collaborate with Mr. Bowie and found a project in “Lazarus,” a musical based on the singer’s work and inspired by Walter Tevis’s 1963 science fiction novel, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” It opened off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop in 2015, the year before Mr. Bowie died of cancer.
On opening night, Mr. Fox wrote in British Vogue, Mr. Bowie “looked beautiful and frail and behaved as always impeccably, and despite being in great pain he took a curtain call with the cast and band to the delight of everyone in the building.”
In addition to Ms. Golfar, a journalist, Mr. Fox is survived by their son, Joe, and daughter, Molly Fox; two daughters, Louise Byng and Chloe King, and a son, Sam, from his marriage to Celestia Sporborg, which ended in divorce; eight grandchildren; and his two brothers. His marriage to Ms. Richardson also ended in divorce.
After Mr. Fox’s death, Kash Bennett, the president of the Society of London Theater trade group, described him in a statement as “one of the defining producers of British theater, whose work on stage and screen left a lasting mark on our cultural life.”
On Wednesday night, on what would have been Mr. Fox’s 74th birthday, the theater marquee lights in the West End of London were dimmed in his honor.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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