Roger Graef
| Roger Graef | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Roger Arthur Graef April 18, 1936 New York, United States |
| Occupation | Theatre director, filmmaker |
Roger Arthur Graef OBE (born 18 April 1936) is a theatre director and filmmaker. Born in New York, he moved to Britain in 1962, where he has made acclaimed documentary films with his ability to gain access to hitherto closed institutions, including Government ministries and court buildings.
Graef was born in New York City, and started directing plays at Harvard University, staging the New England première of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera The Mother of Us All in 1956, and the première of Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons in 1957.
He directed 24 plays in theatres up and down the East Coast, and was chosen by CBS for its new TV drama directors' program. He directed two network dramas for CBS, including The Seven who were Hanged, an hour special adapted and produced by Robert Herridge from the Leonid Andreyev novel of the same name.
Graef moved to Britain in 1962 and directed Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment at the Royal Court and Wyndham's Theatre in the West End of London.
His first film was One of Them is Brett for the Society of Thalidomide Children, to demonstrate to head teachers of primary schools that the physical handicaps of the children did not stop them from being active mentally. It won the Silver Dragon at Cracow, and was shown by the BBC, CBC and ABC Scope in the US. It entered medical school curricula as well. In a BBC interview in 2014 Roger Graef said, " Nobody had ever seen them as people, they had only seen them as cases and it entered medical school curriculum immediately because doctors had never seen them at home."
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