Aida Young

[rustywhite]

Does anyone have a photo of Ms. Young? I'd like to add one to her obit at Einsiders.

[julian_craster]

Obituary : Aida Young
Pioneering woman film and TV producer
by Philip Purser

Wednesday September 19, 2007
The Guardian

Aida Young, who has died aged 86, was one of a number of women in films and television who made their way to the top between the 1940s - arguably the British cinema's finest hour - and the 1960s, when television was shaping up its golden age. She was a production assistant, director and eventually a full-blown producer.
Her particular talent lay in dealing with actors, having herself started on the stage. Born in Stepney, east London, where her parents had a pawnbroker's business, she first trod the boards for the fiercely political Unity Theatre. Her subsequent career took her to the popular rather than the committed wing of the business, notably Hammer horror movies, such popular TV series as Danger Man, and several unwise spin-offs from one medium to the other.
Her first credits were as assistant director or second unit director of low-budget movies, then in 1955 of Hammer's large-screen version of Nigel Kneale's landmark TV serial The Quatermass Experiment. This still had a fairly low budget and a miscast leading character, but the hard-to-please reference-book compiler Leslie Halliwell thought it workmanlike.
For television, Young was production manager on The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957-58) and production supervisor on both The Invisible Man (1958-59) and The Adventures of William Tell (1959-60). These half-hour filmlet series, made by ATV's film subsidiary, ITC, were aimed at the American market as much as the home audience. They were fairly uninspired, though Halliwell thought that William Tell - or Robin Hood in the Alps, as he dubbed it - had vitality.
Danger Man (1960-62) was a deliberate attempt by ATV's legendary boss, Lew Grade, to set a higher standard. The good actor Patrick McGoohan starred as a mysterious Secret Agent (which was the title in America). Though cast in the British James Bond mode, he talked of apartments, not flats, and reckoned in dollars. In later episodes, and a further run of Danger Man, Young was billed as producer.
Back in the House of Hammer, she achieved the same status with The Vengeance of She (1967), followed by a string of Dracula shockers. She went on to produce cinema versions of TV successes, two from Steptoe and Son, one of The Likely Lads. More original and singular projects came in the 1980s, though only one of these was primarily for the home audience - The Country Girls, for Channel 4, from Edna O'Brien's novel of dawning love and sex.
The rest were for American consumption. Children in the Crosssfire (1984) adapted its title from a 1974 BBC documentary filmed in Northern Ireland, but took the form of a semi-fictional story involving American well-wishers; Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil (1985) was a TV movie about a German family in the Nazi era; John and Yoko: a Love Story (1990) recounted the former Beatle's romance and marriage in painstaking detail; The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (also 1990) grappled with the James Bond phenomenon.
Young will be remembered as a safe pair of hands, a friendly and reassuring presence, and a power in the film and television world for half a century. Her husband, Gideon Young, whom she married in 1942, predeceased her. She is survived by their daughters, Ruth and Jane, and four grandchildren.

Aida Young (Aida Cohen) , film and television producer, born August 14 1920; died August 12 2007

[penfold]

Thanks for posting Julian; I didn't think the Guardian would let us down...

[rustywhite]

Finally found a picture of Ms. Young. Here's the link if anyone is interested.

The British Theatre Guide: Aida Young (1920 - 2007)

[julian_craster]

From The Times
September 24, 2007

Aida Young
Producer who was crucial to the success of the Hammer film company

An influential and dynamic figure in British cinema, Aida Young was a leading producer with the Hammer film company at the height of its popularity in the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the first female producers to overcome the waves of sexual discrimination within the film industry at the time, she produced such horror classics as Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), both starring Christopher Lee.
She went on to produce several commercially successful TV spin-off films including Steptoe and Son (1972) and The Likely Lads(1976), and in her later career she switched to producing American TV films, such as the lavish adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1992 soap, To Be the Best, starring Lindsay Wagner and Anthony Hopkins.
Born Aida Cohen in 1920 in Stepney Green, East London, where her parents ran a jewellery shop, she began working for Hammer Films in the late 1940s as a director’s assistant at Bray Studios when the company was making lowbudget melodramas. She was an uncredited director’s assistant on the groundbreaking The Quatermass Experiment (1955) – which led to the company’s production of horror films – and then cut her teeth in television as a production supervisor on two high-rating Lew Grade series, William Tell (1958-59) and Danger Man (196062).
She got her big break in 1965 when she was associate producer of the fantasy adventure She, starring the sex goddess Ursula Andress, and the following year she produced One Million Years BC, a similiar epic starring Raquel Welch.
A shrewd and intelligent business-woman, Young oversaw several other Hammer successes, including The Vengeance of She(1968), Scars of Dracula (1970) and Hands of the Ripper (1971). The Hammer formula called for top budgets of £300,000, a maximum of 25 shooting days, and relatively high promotion budgets.
In 1968, largely due to Young’s business acumen, the company received the Queen’s Award for Industry, thanks to three years of financial success which raised more than £5 million in revenues. Young left Hammer in 1971 just as colour television was beginning to eat into the film industry’s box office figures. She wisely moved into producing TV spin-off films and later went on to produce American and European made-for-TV films. Notable among the projects she was involved with were Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1984), John and Yoko: A Love Story (1985) starring Mark McGann and Kim Miyori, The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1990) with Jason Connery in the title role, and the Emmy-nominated historical drama series Covington Cross (1992) starring Nigel Terry and Cheri Lunghi.
She retained an affection for Hammer Films throughout her life and was much in demand for interviews with film historians. In 1987 she appeared in the TV documentary Hammer: The Studio that Dripped Blood.

Her husband Gideon predeceased her. She is survived by two daughters.

Aida Young, film producer, was born on August 14, 1920. She died on August 12, 2007, aged 86

[rubypix]

Originally Posted by Janice Healey Rubypix can you tell me where Aida died.

As far as I know she died in hospital in London. I was appalled that BAFTA did not mention her during that long sequence they always do of film people who died in the past year; I called her daughter and told her I would write to BAFTA as I am a long time member. I got a letter from one of the Council of BAFTA saying she would be remembered at the BAFTA Television Awards. I watched them lastnight and when the long sequence of TV people who had died was shown, they left her out once again. When one thinks of how much Aida contributed to the film and TV industries and how much she was involved with BAFTA Council I cannot believe they could ignore her this way.