Jack Gold

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title: "Jack Gold" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["british-television-directors", "alumni-of-university-college-london", "british-film-directors", "1930-births", "2015-deaths"] description: "British film and television director (1930–2015)" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Gold" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary British film and television director (1930–2015) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox person"]

Field	Value
name	Jack Gold
birth_name	Jacob Michael Gold
birth_date
birth_place	London, England
death_date
death_place	London, England, UK
occupation	Director
spouse	Denyse Alexander (m. 1957)
::

| name = Jack Gold | embed = | honorific_prefix = | honorific_suffix = | image = | alt = | caption = | birth_name = Jacob Michael Gold | birth_date = | birth_place = London, England | death_date = | death_place = London, England, UK | resting_place = | occupation = Director | spouse = Denyse Alexander (m. 1957)

Jacob Michael Gold (28 June 1930 – 9 August 2015) was a British film and television director. He was part of the British realist tradition which followed the Free Cinema movement.

Career

Jacob Michael Gold was born on 28 June 1930, in North London, the son of Charles and Minnie (née Elbery) Gold.

He studied Economics and Law at University College London. After leaving UCL, he began his career as a film editor on the BBC's Tonight programme. Gold became a freelance documentary filmmaker, making dramas as a platform for his social and political observations.

For television, his best known work is The Naked Civil Servant (1975), based on Quentin Crisp's 1968 book of the same name and starring John Hurt, which won the Grand Prize at the San Remo Film Festival. He had previously directed the 1964 crime series Call the Gun Expert for the BBC.

Other television credits include The Visit (1959), the BBC Television Shakespeare productions of The Merchant of Venice (1980) and Macbeth (1983) - the latter starring Nicol Williamson - as well as the made-for-TV adaptation of Graham Greene's The Tenth Man (1988), starring Anthony Hopkins and Charlie Muffin (1979, USA: A Deadly Game). In 1998, he directed an award-winning-adaption of the 1981 children's book Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, featuring John Thaw in the lead. He also directed films such as The National Health (1973), Man Friday (1975), Aces High (1976), The Medusa Touch (1978), The Chain (1985) and Escape from Sobibor (1987).

Gold directed the final episode of ITV's television detective drama Inspector Morse. Other work includes the television drama series Kavanagh QC and The Brief.

Gold was an Honorary Associate of London Film School.

Personal life

Gold married actress Denyse Alexander (née Macpherson) in 1957, with whom he shared a birthday - she was born in 1932. The couple had three children: Jamie, Kathryn and music producer Nick Gold.{{cite web |url = https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/19492/1/Our%20stories%2C%20from%20us%20the%20%27they%27%20ORIG.pdf|title = Nick Gold talks to Lucy Durán about the making of Buena Vista Social Club|author = Durán, Lucy|date = October 22, 2024|access-date = February 24, 2025| website = soas.ac.uk}}

Filmography

• Living Jazz (1961)
• My Father Knew Lloyd George (1965)
• Famine (1967)
• The World of Coppard (1968)
• The Bofors Gun (1968)
• The Reckoning (1969)
• Stoker Leishman's Diaries (1972)
• The Gangster Show: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1972)
• Conflict (1973; also released as Catholics)
• The National Health (1973)
• Who? (1974)
• Man Friday (1975)
• The Naked Civil Servant (1975)
• Aces High (1976)
• Thank You, Comrades (1978)
• The Medusa Touch (1978)
• The Sailor's Return (1978)
• Charlie Muffin (1979)
• Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980)
• The Merchant of Venice (1980)
• Praying Mantis (1983)
• Macbeth (1983)
• Good and Bad at Games (1983)
• Red Monarch (1983)
• The Chain (1984)
• Sakharov (1984)
• Me and the Girls (1985)
• Murrow (1986)
• Escape from Sobibor (1987)
• Stones for Ibarra (1988)
• The Tenth Man (1988)
• Ball Trap on the Cote Sauvage (1989)
• The Rose and the Jackal (1990)
• The War That Never Ends (1991)
• She Stood Alone (1991)
• ** (1993)
• Spring Awakening (1994)
• The Return of the Native (1994)
• Heavy Weather (1995)
• Into the Blue (1997)
• Goodnight Mister Tom (1998)

References

Other sources

• Aitken, Ian (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York: Routledge, 2005. .

References

1. Purser, Philip. (11 August 2015). "Jack Gold obituary". The Guardian.
2. (August 12, 2015). "Goodnight Mister Tom director Jack Gold dies". [[BBC]].
3. (2015-08-17). "Jack Gold, film director - obituary".
4. "Jack Gold profile". Filmreference.com.
5. "Jack Gold: Bafta-winning director of confrontational documentaries and touching dramas, including Goodnight Mister Tom". The Independent.
6. "22nd London Film Festival programme".
7. Ebert, Roger. (12 March 1976). "Man Friday". Chicago Sun-Times.
8. Vagg, Stephen. (11 September 2025). "Forgotten British Film Studios: The Rank Organisation 1982-1997".
9. {{IMDb name

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