Rudolph Cartier - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), Cartier initially studied to become an architect, before changing career paths and enrolling to study drama at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. There he was taught by Max Reinhardt, who proved a major influence on Cartier. Reinhardt thought of a script as being similar to a musical score, which should be interpreted by a director in the same way as a musician interpreting a piece of music—an approach with which Cartier agreed.

Cartier became involved in the film industry in 1929, when he successfully submitted a script to a company based in Berlin, Germany. He then became a staff scriptwriter for UFA Studios, the primary German film company of the era, for which he worked on crime films and thrillers. While at UFA, he worked with noted writers, directors and producers including Ewald André Dupont and Erich Pommer. In 1933 he became a film director, overseeing the thriller Unsichtbare Gegner for producer Sam Spiegel.

The same year as Unsichtbare Gegner was released, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and the Jewish Cartier left the country. Several members of Cartier's family who had remained in Europe, including his mother, later died in the Holocaust. Encouraged by a UFA colleague, Billy Wilder, to come to Hollywood, Cartier changed his surname and moved to the United States. However, unlike Wilder, Cartier did not find success in America, and in 1935 he moved again, to the United Kingdom.

Little further is recorded of Cartier's career until after the Second World War, when he began writing storylines for several minor British films. He also worked as a film producer, overseeing a 1951 short film adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip. Cartier returned for a time to the United States, where he studied production methods in the new medium of television.

In 1952, Michael Barry, with whom Cartier had worked on an aborted project in 1948, became the new Head of Drama at BBC Television and interviewed Cartier for a post as a staff television producer in the drama department, a job which also involved directing. At his interview, Cartier told Barry that he thought his department's output was "dreadful", and that television drama needed "new scripts and a new approach". In a 1990 interview about his career, he told BBC Two's The Late Show that the BBC drama department had "needed me like water in the desert". Barry shared many of Cartier's views on the need to improve television drama, and he hired him for the producer's job.