---
name: "Peter Glenville"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/peter-glenville"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "28 October 1913"
died: "3 June 1996"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "director"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-20T04:26:33.119782+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Peter Glenville

Director. Born 28 October 1913 in Hampstead, London, England. Died 3 June 1996.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 28 October 1913, Hampstead, London, England
- **Died:** 3 June 1996
- **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar nomination
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Glenville, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1351492, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0322706/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/86659

## Streaming the US now

- **Pluto TV:** [*Becket*](https://film.one/film/becket.md) (79)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Peter Glenville

> A stage director who made films the way he staged plays: a big bare room, a star in the middle of it, and the camera in the best seat. *Becket* shows what that can do; his other films, by reputation, show what it cannot.

Peter Glenville's *Becket* (1964) opens with a king on his knees. Henry II, played by Peter O'Toole, strips to the waist at the tomb of the friend he has lost and waits for the monks to whip him, and the film has told us how the story ends before anyone has said a line. That is a stage director's opening: a strong picture, held, and then the story told to explain it. It caught us sooner than we expected, and it is O'Toole who does the catching, a loud, clever man who wants one friend and cannot keep him.

Glenville had spent his working life in the theatre before he came near a camera. He began as an actor in the 1930s, at Stratford and the Old Vic among other places, was directing at the Old Vic by 1944, and from the late 1940s was one of the leading directors in the West End and on Broadway, often with Terence Rattigan's plays and nearly always with stars. Films came late, from *The Prisoner* in 1955 with Alec Guinness, and they were almost all adaptations: *Summer and Smoke* (1961) from Tennessee Williams, *Term of Trial* (1962), *Becket*, which he had already staged on Broadway, and *The Comedians* (1967), his last. He directed his final stage production in 1973 and then stopped.

What he brought to film is what he had learned on stage, and it works when the actors are worth watching. In *Becket* John Bryan builds big rooms of bare stone with a bed or a throne in them, Geoffrey Unsworth lights from windows and candles, and Glenville puts the actors in the middle and lets them talk. Scenes begin with an entrance and finish with an exit. Anne V. Coates cuts the dialogue cleanly and can do nothing about the fact that it is dialogue. While the man in the middle is O'Toole, none of that matters. When it is Richard Burton's cooler Becket, the second half feels the lack of movement.

He said the director should, like a conductor, be "an interpreter of a particular world of each playwright with whom he works", and that is a modest and honourable idea of the job. It is also a theatre idea. On stage, an interpreter who stands back and lets a star fill the room is doing his work. On film, standing back is a choice the camera records, and Glenville's later films have a reputation for casts that promised more than the pictures delivered: Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret in *Term of Trial*, Elizabeth Taylor, Burton, Guinness and Peter Ustinov in *The Comedians*. We will not judge them here, but the pattern is the one *Becket* half shows.

Start with *Becket*, for O'Toole and for Unsworth's candlelight on stone, and do not expect the camera to go anywhere the actors do not.

## Biography

Peter Glenville (born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne) was an English stage and film director and actor. Born on 28 October 1913 in Hampstead, London, he came from a theatrical family; his parents Shaun Glenville and Dorothy Ward were pantomime performers. He was educated at Stonyhurst College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

Glenville began his career as an actor in the West End before establishing himself as a director of plays in London and on Broadway from the 1940s onwards. He was nominated for four Tony Awards. In the 1950s he moved into film, directing *The Prisoner* (1955), *Summer and Smoke* (1961), *Term of Trial* (1962), *Becket* (1964) — for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director — *Hotel Paradiso* (1966) and *The Comedians* (1967). He died on 3 June 1996 in New York.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, ibdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Becket* (1964), Fi1m 79, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/becket.md)

## Complete filmography (13)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *The Comedians* (1967), Director, Producer
- *Hotel Paradiso* (1966), as Georges Feydeau · Director, Writer, Producer
- *Becket* (1964), Director — Fi1m 79, [page](https://film.one/film/becket.md)
- *Term of Trial* (1962), Director, Screenplay
- *Summer and Smoke* (1961), Director
- *Me and the Colonel* (1958), Director
- *The Prisoner* (1955), Director
- *Good-Time Girl* (1948), as Jimmy Rosso
- *Madonna of the Seven Moons* (1945), as Sandro Barucci
- *Heaven Is Round the Corner* (1944), as Donald McKay
- *Uncensored* (1942), as Charles Neels
- *Return to Yesterday* (1940), as Undetermined Role (uncredited)
- *His Brother’s Keeper* (1940), as Hicky Cornell

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 1 nominated

- 1965: Best Director (nominated), for *Becket*

### Other awards — 0 won, 4 nominated

- Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play 1963: Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play (nominated)
- Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical 1960: Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical (nominated)
- Tony Award for Best Director 1959: Tony Award for Best Director (nominated)
- Tony Award for Best Director 1957: Tony Award for Best Director (nominated)

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

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© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/peter-glenville