Piers Haggard

Piers Inigo Haggard, OBE (18 March 1939 – 11 January 2023) was an English director who worked in film, television, and theatre. He was known for directing numerous television programmes and serials in a career which spanned over 40 years, and won a BAFTA TV Award for the musical drama serial Pennies from Heaven. His notable theatrical films included the cult classic horror film The Blood on Satan's Claw, which is recognized as the progenitor of the folk horror genre.

Haggard was also a founding member and the first chairman of the Directors Guild of Great Britain (DGGB), as well as a co-founder of Directors UK.

Early life A member of the Haggard family, he was born in London, the son of Morna Gillespie and the actor, poet, and novelist Stephen Haggard. He was the great-great-nephew of the writer Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Shortly after they left, his father wrote his sons a letter, which later that year was published in the Atlantic Monthly as "I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter to His Sons". Haggard and his mother returned to Britain after his brother's death from diphtheria. There a younger brother, Mark, was born. In 1962, he moved to the Glasgow Citizens, where productions included Albert Finney as Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV. where he co-directed with John Dexter and Bill Gaskill and assisted Laurence Olivier (1963 on Uncle Vanya, starring Michael Redgrave) and Franco Zeffirelli (1965 on Much Ado About Nothing, with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens).

In 1978, Haggard was hired by producer Kenith Trodd to direct Dennis Potter's BBC drama serial Pennies from Heaven, which received a BAFTA. In 1972, Haggard married stained glass artist Anna Sklovsky, with whom he had two children, including Daisy Haggard.

Death Haggard died on 11 January 2023, at the age of 83.

Selected filmography Wedding Night (1970) The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) The Love School (1975) The Quatermass Conclusion (1979) The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980) Venom (1981) A Summer Story (1988) Four Eyes and Six Guns (1992) Conquest (1998)