Waris Hussein

Waris Habibullah

1946–present

Waris Hussein is a pioneering director who has worked for film, television and the stage. Born Waris Habibullah, he is the son of writer Attia Hosain and Ali Bahadur Habibullah. He moved with his mother and father, who was an Indian diplomat in the Indian High Commission, to London in 1946.

His mother forged a long-standing career as a broadcaster on the BBC, first for the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, later on the Home Service. Hussein went to school at Clifton College, Bristol, where he studied from 1952 to 1957, and then read English at Cambridge University. At university he began to develop his passion for directing. He graduated in 1960 and then joined the BBC’s drama department to become a director and enrolled on its training course. He initially directed on the long-running Compact programme, before directing the pilot and first episodes of the popular cult television series Dr Who (1963). He was also commissioned to direct the epic historical adventure drama series Marco Polo. He continued to work regularly with the BBC on notable productions, including Santha Rama Rau’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, staring Sybil Thorndike and Zia Nohyeddin, who had previously played the role in the play version. The television version was broadcast on BBC1 on 15 November 1965 as part of the Play of the Month series. Other notable productions include the first episode in the Armchair Thriller anthology series (1978). He also directed the BBC drama Shoulder to Shoulder, focused on the suffrage movement. In 1978 he directed the series Edward and Mrs Simpson, for which he won a BAFTA award. Hussein’s feature films include A Touch of Love (1969), an adaptation of Margaret Drabble’s novel The Millstone featuring Ian McKellen, with whom he had already worked at university, Melody (1971) and Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972). During the 1980s and 1990s, Hussein worked on television movies in the US. In 1997 he directed Sixth Happiness, based on Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow, which featured Meera Syal and Nina Wadia.

His work in theatre includes George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1961), which transferred from Cambridge’s Arts Theatre to the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, Julian Mitchell’s Half Life (1977) starring John Gielgud, the first play at the National Theatre directed by a person of South Asian heritage, and an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man at Greenwich Theatre (1989).