"The death of Tony Whitehead is a great loss to Chapter, his family and friends. For more than a decade Tony had been our programmer and Head of Cinema Department. His film programme was eagerly anticipated each month and he supported innovative education work that reached thousands of young people. His expertise extended to teaching at university and reviewing on radio and television. Most recently he researched and wrote a major book in collaboration with Mike Leigh. Tony was working until a few months before his death helping to shape the cinema improvements in Chapter’s redevelopment.

The last event Tony organised was the live appearance of director Mike Leigh. Tony was too ill to attend but coordinated the event from his home office. The evening embodied the qualities that Tony championed: an enthusiastic audience, a knowledgeable interviewer and a great film maker in a conversation that was candid, funny and full of insight into cinema and the world we live in.

We extend our deep and heartfelt sympathy to Tony’s wife Sara and all of his family. On behalf of everyone at Chapter I would like to express thanks for all the messages we have received in appreciation of Tony’s life and work."

Janek Alexander, Director of Chapter

Tony Whitehead (1962-2008)

All friends of Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre will be saddened by the death, at 46, of Chapter Cinema Manager and programmer Tony Whitehead, a witty, unfailingly selfless man with a remarkable knowledge of film, and a particular penchant for British screen comedy.

Tony stamped his personality on the centre from his arrival in 1997 and was the latest in a superb line of knowledgeable and painstakingly conscientious cinema programmers – Linda Pariser, Steve Freer, Peter Grant et al. I was gutted to learn of Tony’s death, just a few years after his long-time friend and equally inspirational Chapter cinema office colleague Dave Prothero was plucked from us in 2001, aged 35.

If there is consolation, it seems curiously appropriate that Tony should have succumbed within a few hours of Paul Newman, another man richly endowed with essential goodness and remembered for his innate modesty.

Tony Whitehead made all visitors and guest speakers feel that Chapter was their home-from-home and he set high standards in ensuring that everyone who visited was privy to the best in world cinema. As Dave Gillam, the temporary cinema programmer at Chapter for the past few months, points out: "Tony took a sort of pride in being one of the old school, a thorough professional who saw no reason why film enthusiasts shouldn’t see the best from all over the world. He was never merely a camp follower of the latest trend or fad. He was a wonderful man with a good moral compass," Dave told me.

Tony loved to expose audiences to the great classics of silent days and to encourage musicians to accompany them ‘live’, often gambling with experimental and stimulating new scores. I remember Cipher’s music earlier this year for Phantom of the Opera.

Neil Brand, a former Aberystwyth university student, now renowned as the finest of all specialist silent cinema pianists, loved to play at Chapter, whether it be for Keaton or Hitchcock or for the work of directors or actors of the past more readily forgotten.

Tony was deeply respectful of old troupers, those who had done it all and had so much to teach us and I don’t think I’ll ever forget his undisguised pleasure when playing host to Peter O’Toole and the actor’s great friend, that consummate Welsh comic character actor Ken Griffith at Ken’s 80th Birthday celebration event in Chapter.

He told a great story of meeting O’Toole at Cardiff station one night when the actor was worryingly late. Finally almost the last train arrived, wrecked by vandals, with only apparently some football louts aboard. Tony had almost given him up when he saw at the far end of the platform the silhouette of the familiarly gaunt, gangling figure, in a cape or cloak, nonchalant as ever. O’Toole confirmed, with wry amusement, that his carriage had been visited by troublemakers primed for violence. One of them recognised Lawrence of Arabia, they were in awe and scampered pronto in deference to the great thesp.

Tony was an expert on all kinds of cinema, and a rich source of anecdotes on British cinema genres and the foibles of indigenous film and TV comics from the Carry On films onwards. It wasn’t surprising that he was a sought after speaker at festivals and events and was a programming committee member for years at the popular Shots in the Dark festival in Nottingham.

He had a particular penchant for the work of the Boulting Bros., with their savage challenging tilts on class in British society notably with I’m All Right Jack and Heavens Above!, featuring Peter Sellers and his inevitable foil Kenneth Griffith. Tony also loved the pair in the Swansea-set Only Two Can Play (1962) made by that even more respected filmmaking team Launder and Gilliat.

We were lucky perhaps that Tony, a former Ormskirk Grammar School boy, gained his degree in English and American literature, with film studies, at East Anglia University, where he fell under the spell of Charles Barr, that respected teacher who had written a definitive history of Ealing Studios and the long line of great comedies later to figure in so many Chapter retrospectives - The Lavender Hill Mob, Whisky Galore, Kind Hearts and Coronets, etc..

Tony had, of course, far broader tastes in British cinema. He was a particular devotee of Powell and Pressburger. A Matter of Life and Death was perhaps his favourite British film, but - not entirely because he was a proud Salfordian (though he was born just a few miles away in Hyde, Cheshire) - he felt an unswerving affinity for that lugubrious-looking card Mike Leigh, who grew up in the same square miles and brought to the screen biting, often mordant satire on British society and mores and a ravenous appetite for Dickensian caricature.

It was fitting that Tony’s book on Leigh, published by Manchester University Press earlier this year, should be his final, surely lasting achievement.

We whiled away convivial hours of banter and badinage talking about Mike Leigh (with Tony attacking, the while, his beloved Rev. James with missionary zeal).  In my ignorance I was a Ken Loach man, and thought some of Leigh’s early work patronising about the working class. It’s partly thanks to Tony's book that, of late I have come to see how those comparisons are invidious – that Leigh had little pretensions to the realist tradition and ploughed more ambitious furrows. For years to come, I hope, I will still be wrestling with some of Tony’s more cogent arguments and be so thankful that he was able to make them all in print.

Tony served in various part-time capacities at the Triangle Cinema, Birmingham from 1984-87, was entertainments manager at Scunthorpe Film Theatre 1987 -1990, cinema manager at the Forum, Northampton from 1990-94 and director of programming at the Metro, Derby from 1994-97.

He is survived by his parents Kath and Graham, brother Duncan and his wife Sara - a great bastion of strength and comfort to Tony, especially in those last months.

Dave Berry

Dave Berry is a film historian and critic and author of Wales and Cinema: The First Hundred Years.

Read a selection of personal tributes to Tony here