Jill Craigie; Pioneering British Filmmaker

Jill Craigie, a documentary filmmaker who was the first woman in British film to attain wide public recognition for her directorial efforts, has died.

Craigie, the wife of Britain’s former Labor Party leader Michael Foot, died Dec. 13 at a hospital in London. She was 85 and had been ill for some time.

British film was a male bastion when Craigie began her career as a writer of propaganda shorts for the British government in the early 1940s. In 1943, she co-wrote a script about two heroic Belgian airmen. The film from that script, called “The Flemish Farm,” fueled her ambition to direct.

“I did decide, quite deliberately,” she later said, “Why shouldn’t a woman make a film?” But Craigie also realized that women had limited opportunities in the male-dominated industry. “I couldn’t go to the cutting rooms or anything,” she said.

In 1943, she was given the opportunity to direct a documentary short about modern art. The film, called “Out of Chaos,” featuring artist Henry Moore, was well received.

Her breakthrough effort was the critically praised, full-length 1946 documentary “The Way We Live,” which told of postwar life and readjustment for an average British family in Plymouth, one of the most devastated towns in England.

Craigie wrote and directed “The Way We Live” and received a good bit of press coverage during the film’s making, most of it not to her liking.

“I had an enormous amount of publicity,” she said, “ . . all for the wrong reasons. ‘Although she’s in charge of 40 men, she’s very feminine’--that sort of terrible stuff.”

She also fought production company officials who tried to block the film because they felt it would not make money. “It’s not meant to,” she said in making her case for the film. Craigie prevailed.

It was during that period that she met Foot, her future husband, who was running for a seat in Parliament from the Plymouth area. They were together from that time on, finally marrying in 1949.

It was Craigie’s third marriage. Her first one, to the sculptor Claude Begbie Clench, produced a daughter, Julie, who became a photographer.

The same year, Craigie’s “Blue Scar,” a look at life in a poor Welsh mining area, was released, this time to mixed reviews from critics who felt the work was politically naive.

Her film-directing work began to dwindle after that. She continued to write, however, penning the script for “Man With a Million,” a 1953 film starring Gregory Peck.

In 1995, at a time when many of her contemporaries were retiring, she resurfaced to make “Two Hours From London,” a documentary about the former Yugoslavia and the destruction of Dubrovnik. Foot paid for the initial shooting of the film out of his pension and was the film’s narrator, but only after his wife arranged voice coaching to tone down his oratorical House of Commons voice.

The film was a fierce indictment of the passivity of the West, including the British government, in the face of Serbian aggression. The BBC withheld the film for 18 months, then showed a severely cut version.

Born in London, Craigie was the only child of Scottish-Russian parents. Her father was killed in World War I and Craigie was sent to a variety of boarding schools, 13 in all.

She wrote advice columns for London newspapers after finishing school and was embraced by the artistic and literary set in London.

For the last few decades of her life she was said to be working on a history of the suffragette movement in England, a subject that was close to her heart. She wrote and produced a BBC radio documentary on the movement in 1952 and organized a photographic exhibition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Franchise Act.

Her interest in the movement started in 1940, when she happened upon a number of the group’s survivors at a funeral for one of their members.

“You realize, my dear, we are all jailbirds,” they told her.