In 1960 Patrick Macnee worked as an associated producer for the BBC production "The Valiant Years" about war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The production ran on BBC TV from February 11th to August 5th 1961 and was very successful. There were repeats after Churchill's death in 1965, but until today it was not released on DVD.
Director:
Currently it's known that Patrick Macnee worked as a director of three plays.
1. A Sleep of Prisoners (1959) 2. Look Back in Anger (July 1959) 3. Winkleberg (August 25-30, 1959)
In an interview in TV Times from 21.4.1961, Patrick Macnee talked about his work as director of Ben Hecht’s play Winkleberg in the United States.
“In 1959 I directed Ben Hecht’s play 'Winkleberg' in the States. It was all about the Chicago flop houses. Hecht could never get over the fact that an old Etonian could know so much about the Chicago slums”. And Macnee goes on: “He didn’t know that in 1955 I was so broke that I was living in them for a time". It looks like Hecht was quite impressed. His biography “Five lives of Ben Hecht” is inscribed on front free endpaper to Patrick Macnee “whose knowledge of the subject is first hand”. His work has also been praised by the critic in 1959: "Special mention should be given to Patrick McNee's direction and Homer Greathouse's set design, for their combined work resulted in a very effective staging of an otherwise uninteresting vehicle". (Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1959)
Hecht's play run at the Laguna Playhouse in California, where Patrick Macnee also directed John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger in Summer 1959. Critics were very positive about his work as the Los Angeles Times (July 24, 1959) wrote: "Patrick MacNee does a fine job of directing the John Osborne drama...".
He also worked as an actor at the Laguna Playhouse in August 1959. He played the military commander in Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw. In the same year he directed Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners which was presented in the Westwood Methodist Church on May 3, 1959.
