Ken Hughes — Film Director & Screenwriter

Cromwell was his Masterpiece

If you look closely at the poster of Cromwell above you will see that Ken Hughes, the writer and director, only gets third billing (albeit twice), with the producer, Irving Allen, giving himself top slot. Sadly Hughes never really achieved the power and kudos he deserved. Perhaps he was considered by some producers to be little more than a good, and reliable, jobbing director. If that’s the case they were wrong — he was much better than that.

Born in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1922, Hughes was raised in London where, aged fourteen, he won an amateur film contest, which enabled him to get a job as a cinema projectionist. Two years later, in 1938, he managed to get himself the job of a sound engineer at the BBC. In 1941 he left the BBC to make documentaries and training films for the government. After the war he returned to the BBC for a while.

In 1952 he got the chance to make his first cinema feature, the crime thriller Wide Boy. This film proved his worth as a director, and by 1955 he was making more crime movies with “imported” B list Hollywood stars, most notably Joe MacBeth, starring Paul Douglas.