Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster died 19 August 2011. Born James Henry Kinmel Sangster on 2 December 1927, in North Wales, UK, he won the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films’ Golden Scroll career award in 1977.
According to this Hammer Films obituary, he “started in the industry aged 16, working his way up from gopher and clapper boy, through projection assistant, before taking up a post with Exclusive Films as an assistant director following a stint in the RAF.”
Hammer continues “Legend has it that Sangster’s screenwriting career came about almost by accident. Asked by producer Anthony Hinds to write a script, Sangster protested that he knew nothing about screenwriting. Hinds told him he would only pay him if he liked it, and duly did.
“Sangster’s short A Man on the Beach was followed by his script for X The Unknown, designed as a follow-up to The Quatermass Xperiment. But it would be Sangster’s reworking of Frankenstein that changed not only his career but the direction of Hammer itself. Sangster shifted the emphasis from the creation onto the creator, in the process providing Hammer with one of its most interesting and complex characters.”
The New York Times quotes a later interview with Sangster: “I wrote horror movies because it was my job,” he said. “So, when anyone asks me what were the influences that prompted me to be a ‘horror film’ writer, I tell them it was Wages!”
With the growth of American horror films in the early 1970s, lead by such entries as The Exorcist, Sangster, too, turned his sights to the US, and began writing for US television.
This Hammer obituary lists all of Sangster’s Hammer credits. His other genre work includes: Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Crawling Eye (1958), Jack the Ripper (1959), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), 22 episodes of Circle of Fear (1972-73), Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), three episodes of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1976-77), Good Against Evil (1977), The Legacy (1978), Phobia (1980), and The Devil and Max Devlin (1981).
He wrote several novels (mostly mysteries and crime stories), and an autobiography called Do You Want It Good or Tuesday? (published by Midnight Marquee Press in 2009).
He is survived by his wife, the actress Mary Peach, and a son, Mark James Sangster.