Rocky Horror producer Michael White dies

Michael White, who has died aged 80, produced The Rocky Horror Show, Oh, Calcutta!, the London premieres of work by Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, the early shows of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and outstanding comedy movies such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Comic Strip Presents.

He was the epitome of the kind of producer who produced only the sort of show he himself wanted to see. And White was a social phenomenon and gadfly, an old-style playboy who threw the best parties in town and was a fixture, for most of his life, at the Cannes Film Festival. His best friends included Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger and the model Kate Moss, who presented him with a lifetime achievement award at the Oliviers two years ago.

In his acceptance speech, White in a wheelchair (after suffering several strokes) paid tribute to three mentors: Peter Daubeny, with whom he first worked on the fantastic World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych in the 1960s; film director Tony Richardson; and critic and creator of Oh, Calcutta!, Kenneth Tynan.

He cheerfully admitted that he signed away his rights on the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a haze of drugs, but he never turned bitter, and rarely made enemies. And in Joe Papp at the Public Theater in New York, he found a kindred spirit, most notably in bringing the Public’s Galt McDermot musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona and their sensational, unlikely musical A Chorus Line to the West End, or translating My Dinner With Andre, starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn just talking to each other, to the big screen, directed by Louis Malle.

I was at the first ever performance of The Rocky Horror Show in the tiny Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in 1973; I went along with a fellow critic who was reviewing the show, and it must have started at around 10.30pm as we first watched Edward Bond‘s The Sea on the main stage. I liked it, especially the first half hour and the first three songs, but no-one, least of all Richard O’Brien or the Court hierarchy (who didn’t like it at all) expected White to turn it into the monster hit it became when he moved the show along the King’s Road to a dilapidated cinema.

Not only was White an exceptionally clever and gifted impresario, he was hip, cool and well-connected. He made a lot of money, and lost a lot, too (he was declared bankrupt in 2005) but he never lost his eye for talent, or his enthusiasm for the sexy and outrageous on the margins of the transatlantic theatre culture. Even his flops had style. And he was heavily involved in such mainstream popular hits as the musical Annie and Ira Levin’s thriller Deathtrap.