Paul Almond produced and directed more than 100 tele- vision dramas in Toronto, London, and Los Angeles between 1954 and 1967. Almond has produced and directed dramas for such Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) shows as Folio, The Unforeseen, and Wojeck.

Among his many accomplishments in “live” or “live-to-tape” television are the early experimental religious drama The Hill, which used simple wooden platforms, a cyclorama, and improvisation; Arthur Hailey’s realistic early drama about the threats of nuclear technology, Seeds of Power; the fascinating, televisual adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s radio piece Under Milk Wood, which alternated between stylized shots of elements of the set with realistic shots of the actors; Harold Pinter’s controversial Birthday Party; A Close Prisoner, the self-reflexive and chilling satire by Clive Exton; and television versions of Christopher Fry’s Sleep of Prisoners, Venus Observed, and A Phoenix Too Frequent and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. He also produced and directed a chilling adaptation of Crime and Punishment, called The Murderer; the dark, antiwar comedy The Neutron and the Olive; and his creative partner, designer Rudy Dorn’s, drama about World War II from the point of view of a German soldier, The Broken Sky. Other successful adaptations included Macbeth, with Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell, using only a flight of steps and a huge throne, and Julius Caesar, using one 12-foot decorative column. At the time of these “experimental” productions, Dorn and Almond shared a theory that the “only real thing was the emotion expressed on the face of a really good actor.”

Almond directed for the most successful series in CBC television history, Wojeck, including the prescient episode on drug abuse (“All Aboard for Candy land”), at a time when such subjects were rarely seen on television.

Two of his 1960s dramas were censored by the CBC: Anouilh’s Point of Departure, which showed two unmarried people in bed together, and Shadow of a Pale Horse, a vivid antiwar drama that depicted, according to the broadcaster, a too-explicit hanging in one scene. In instances such as these, when the CBC management threatened to cancel a program (which became easier when tape came into use), the corporation, under pressure from its creative staff, sometimes compromised by scheduling the drama at 11:30 P.M., when it was hoped that everyone likely to complain was in bed. In the case of Michael Tait’s Fellowship, the CBC canceled the show altogether but relented and broadcast it at a later date. In a rare return to television in 1978, Almond directed the award-winning docudrama Every Person Is Guilty, on the anthology For the Record.

Television critics and colleagues said of Almond that he was “the mystic,” “the romantic,” “the man with an eye for symbolic levels of meaning,” an “actor’s director.” Cameraman and well-known television writer Grahame Woods said, “he’s very responsive and creates a lot of energy. He had a passion for what he was doing and it’s infectious.” The actor and director David Gardner characterized Almond’s work as “moody. . . . The camera moved a great deal. He was a very volatile director. But once you got to know Paul it was terrific.”

Almond himself has said that in some ways he preferred live television to any other form, because it had not only an excitement but a flow of action. In his view, live television allowed both the cameraperson and the director more freedom to respond to the performance itself and literally “call the shots” in unforeseen patterns and rhythms. Early television did not require three people to run a camera. Almond was one of the most influential of the generation of producers and directors in the 1950s and 1960s who were discovering what could be done with the huge, clumsy, and unreliable cameras of live television. He and his coconspirators took “live-to- tape” drama, which was supposed to be taped with minimum interruption because it was very difficult to edit, into territory that demanded many pauses for change of scene, costume, or special effects. From those early experiments and the eventual discovery of cleaner, easier ways to edit tape came true electronic drama.

With limited CBC experience of filmed TV drama, Almond adapted to film so well that his first full-length feature film Isabel in 1968 (shown on the CBC in 1969) was a critical success and was followed by such films as The Act of the Heart, Final Assignment, and Captive Hearts. In 1999 Almond’s first two books, High Hopes: Coming of Age in the Mid-Century and La Vengeance des Dieux were published by ECW Press and Art Global, respectively.