Fons Rademakers, born on 5 September 1920 in Roosendaal, started his career as actor and theatre
director.
Rademakers, who studied at the Amsterdam Academy of Dramatic Arts and began his career as an actor, was drafted into the Dutch army in the second world war, and was captured by the Germans but released because “they considered that actors were not threatening.” In 1943 he fled to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of the war.
Returning to Amsterdam, he joined a theatre company, before deciding, at the age of 35, that he wanted to direct films. He therefore became second assistant director to Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica and Charles Crichton before embarking on Village by the River. This focused on an eccentric doctor who settles in a village on the banks of the Meuse early in the 20th century. He dedicates himself to caring for the poor and puncturing the pomposity of the local authorities, of whom he eventually falls foul. Based on an Antoon Coolen novel… read more
Fons Rademakers, born on 5 September 1920 in Roosendaal, started his career as actor and theatre
director.
Rademakers, who studied at the Amsterdam Academy of Dramatic Arts and began his career as an actor, was drafted into the Dutch army in the second world war, and was captured by the Germans but released because “they considered that actors were not threatening.” In 1943 he fled to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of the war.
Returning to Amsterdam, he joined a theatre company, before deciding, at the age of 35, that he wanted to direct films. He therefore became second assistant director to Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica and Charles Crichton before embarking on Village by the River. This focused on an eccentric doctor who settles in a village on the banks of the Meuse early in the 20th century. He dedicates himself to caring for the poor and puncturing the pomposity of the local authorities, of whom he eventually falls foul. Based on an Antoon Coolen novel, it combined a sense of documentary truth with a characteristic intensity of emotion.
Most of Rademakers’ films were adapted from novels but, as he claimed, “Shakespeare and Molière didn’t create their subjects either.” An exception was his second film, That Joyous Eve (1960), for which he wrote the original script with his wife, Lili Rademakers, who was assistant director on all his films before becoming a director in her own right. Set in the late 1950s, That Joyous Eve, which won the Silver Bear at Berlin, dealt with three families on the celebration of St Nicholas’ Eve, a traditional Dutch holiday on December 5.
Rademakers followed this with The Knife (1960), which tells a story in flashback entirely from the point of view of a 13-year-old boy (a startlingly uncompromising performance), who discovers his mother in a degrading sexual relationship with his tutor. This plodding but powerful psychological drama, influenced in part by Ingmar Bergman, a friend of the director, was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes.
Rademakers’ fourth film, Like Three Drops of Water (1963), also nominated for a Golden Palm, was not released until nearly 40 years after it was made. The problem was that Alfred Heineken (he of the beer) agreed to produce the film on the condition that his girlfriend, Nan Los, starred in it. When she dumped him after filming was completed, Heineken withdrew all copies of the movie, which remained unseen until his death in 2002. The tale of a timid photographer who meets his doppelgänger, a heroic British agent who parachutes into his backyard during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and becomes involved in the resistance, had not worn well, being more interesting in the premise than in the execution.
Rademakers’ rather theatrical style put him at odds with many of the younger directors influenced by the French New Wave, and he made only three films in the following 10 years, including Because of the Cats (1973), which was notorious for its gang rape scene. During this period, however, he returned to acting, notably in Harry Kumel’s bizarre Daughters of Darkness (1972), about a young couple caught up with lesbian vampires. Rademakers plays the young man’s mother, beautifully underplaying the character’s campness.
Max Havelaar (1976) marked Rademakers’ return to form as a director. His most expensive and expansive film, it dealt with a civil servant whose attempts to reform a corrupt local system in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) are thwarted by his government and mercantile interests. Adapted from an 1859 novel by Multatuli (Edouard Doewes Dekker), which attacked Dutch colonial rule, the film takes a less astringent approach than the book, but the contrast between the scenes of Amsterdam and Java are effective and the recreation of the era compelling.
After winning his Oscar, Rademakers produced his wife’s film, Diary of a Mad Old Man (1987), and directed his last movie, The Rose Garden (1989), a gripping, English-language production starring Liv Ullmann, Maximilian Schell and Peter Fonda, about the effects of the Holocaust.
Rademakers, who is survived by his wife and two sons, died of emphysema after doctors turned off life support machines at the film-maker’s request.
· Alphonse Marie ‘Fons’ Rademakers, film director and actor, born September 5 1920; died February 22 2007. —The Guardian
