Brabazon, James 1923-2007 [A pseudonym] (Leslie James Seth–Smith)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Original name, Leslie James Seth-Smith; born January 12, 1923, in Kampala, Uganda; died November 5, 2007. Stage actor, television director and producer, filmwriter, biographer, and author. Brabazon worked as a professional stage actor in England for several years before moving behind the scenes as a television director and producer in the mid-1950s. He began his writing career working as an advertising copywriter for a few years before offering his first stage play, People of Nowhere, to a London audience in 1959. That was the same year that Associated Rediffusion Television broadcast his first television play, Notes for a Love-Song. Brabazon devoted most of his professional career to television as a producer and director for British networks such as Granada, London Weekend Television, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and also as a filmwriter, including his work as coauthor of the screenplay for the award-winning film Lost in Siberia (1991). Brabazon never forgot his roots, however, or the novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers, who had encouraged his thespian career in the 1940s. His 1981 biography Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life of a Courageous Woman was well received by critics. Brabazon also wrote a biography of Albert Schweitzer in 1975 and edited Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings in 2005.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), February 12, 2008, p. 55.