 Michael Relph began his career in 1932 working under Alfred Junge in the Gaumont-British Art Department, joining Ealing in 1942, having also designed for the stage from 1934. At Ealing he embarked on a longstanding, creative partnership with director Basil Dearden, sometimes sharing with Dearden the producer-director-writer credit in the manner of - if not with the same panache as - Powell and Pressburger. Relph later described himself and Dearden as the 'workhorses' of Ealing, and certainly they turned out more films there than any of the other production teams. The films on which Relph is credited as director are not among his favourites: he never felt he had the director's temperament and also felt he only directed what Dearden didn't want to. It may be argued that Relph's greatest achievement, apart from the very considerable one of providing a congenial production climate for Dearden, was as designer, especially during his great period at Ealing in the '40s, when he was responsible for the varied production values of They Came to a City (d. Dearden, 1944), with its deliberately stylised sets, the realistic evocation of a prisoner-of-war camp in The Captive Heart (d. Dearden, 1946), the provincial chintziness under threat in Frieda (d. Dearden, 1947), the class-discriminatory settings in Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer, 1949), the documentary-like realism of The Blue Lamp (d. Dearden, 1949) and, above all, the Oscar-nominated designs for the sumptuous Technicolor period film, Saraband for Dead Lovers (d. Dearden, 1948). Relph and Dearden continued their successful partnership after the demise of Ealing until Dearden's death in a car crash in 1971. Relph became chairman of the BFI Production Board in 1972 and returned to film production only three more times. The son of George Relph, he is the father of Simon Relph. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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FILM & TV CREDITS
