Screenwriter who came up with wonderful parts for women, as in his television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown
The screenwriter Ken Taylor, who has died aged 88, had his first radio play broadcast in 1941. Anyone who has enjoyed drama in the intervening 70 years will have been touched by his work for radio, television, film and stage, which included a Bafta-nominated adaptation of Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn for Channel 4 (1992), the 1983 BBC version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, a 1975 adaptation of Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means and the 1964 teleplay The Devil and John Brown, for which he won the Writers' Guild award. Perhaps his biggest success was The Jewel in the Crown, the 1984 Granada television mini-series based upon the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott, which earned him an Emmy nomination and the writer of the year award from the Royal Television Society.
I was asked to look at the role of Ronald Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown in 1981, and worked my way through the huge pile of scripts adapted by Ken from Scott's astonishing books, which I knew and loved. I was aware of Ken by reputation, but I was apprehensive. The books present enormous challenges to the adapter. I realised quite soon that I was in good hands. Not only had Ken sorted out the books' jigsaw of events, he had achieved narrative chronology without losing the story's power.
He also captured the psychological complexities of character in which Scott's books abound. Almost impossibly, he had woven in some of the central images: fire is very important; so is the notion of black and white, light and dark, good and evil. In Ken's hands, these threads acquired a thematic weight that gave the dramatisation real depth. The sense of mystery and suspense which the books engender had also been preserved – a mystery which is drawn partly from India itself (where Ken served as an RAF radio operator in 1941, at around the time the books are set in) and partly from the unravelling of the dark heart of Scott's story.
The producer/director Chris Morahan invited me to meet Ken in the company of The Jewel in the Crown's co-director, Jim O'Brien. Ken seemed a little tense. I later realised that this was just "him" – taut, concentrated, eager – but he put me at my ease, and asked me if I thought there was anything missing from his adaptation. From well over 1,000 pages, I had found only two details. Discussing one of them – the snake in the bath – Ken picked the relevant script from the pile, flicked the glasses which he always wore up on to his forehead, held the page close, and examined it fixedly. It was quintessential Ken, subjecting the material to an intense scrutiny. His eye had peered thus at the whole of Scott's mighty Quartet.
My favourite scene from Jewel is when Barbie Batchelor (Peggy Ashcroft) finds Mabel Layton (Fabia Drake) dozing over a book. She gently removes her glasses, but Mabel wakes and invites her to talk. Touched, Barbie sits on the bed and chatters. Mabel eventually says: "I am ready for the light now." Barbie switches it off. Mabel goes into the dark. I scoured the books in order to enjoy this scene again, but could not find the dialogue. The scene was there, of course, but an indication of the sheer brilliance of Ken's work was that I had mistaken his writing for Scott's original.
Ken was born in Bolton, the seventh son of a Lancashire cotton-mill owner, and was sent to Gresham's school, Norfolk, where he discovered drama. But the sight of the many unemployed, idle in the streets, sparked a lifelong political conscience. He delayed a place at Cambridge in order to fight nazism, so it is hardly surprising that, when he was able to concentrate on writing, his plays dealt with serious issues.
After the second world war, Ken studied theatre direction at the Old Vic theatre school. His first marriage, to Elizabeth Tillotson, led to a daughter, Pamela, but they subsequently divorced. In 1950, working for the Under Thirty Theatre Group, he met Jill Black, whom he married in 1953 and with whom he had three children, Matthew, Vikki and Simon. All four children grew up together in Cornwall and London.
In 1951 Ken was co-founder of the Leatherhead theatre (I joked once that he must have had a day off from writing), but this was a rich time for television writers and he was lured into the "mid-Atlantic market". The arrival of commercial television in the UK in the mid-1950s provided new opportunities, and Ken made a formidable name for himself as a writer of gritty, kitchen-sink drama. He first worked with Morahan in 1961 on a television drama, The Long Distance Blue, starring Tom Bell, and again, in 1962, on Ken's play The Slaughter Men, which gave James Bolam his first starring role. Sydney Newman, then BBC head of drama, commissioned Ken to write a trilogy of plays at the launch of BBC2 in 1964 – The Seekers. Another trilogy, The Magicians, soon followed.
Ken later remarked that by this time, he had said everything he wanted to say as an original writer, which was partly why he turned to fact-based drama in his search for an understanding of the human condition: the suffragettes, the French revolution, Auschwitz, a Scottish collier trapped by a pit-fall. The Poisoning of Charles Bravo (1977) dramatised a famous Victorian mystery and was later adapted for the stage. His many adaptations plundered the work of (among others) Somerset Maugham, HG Wells, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and DH Lawrence.
Ken was rare in that he wrote wonderful parts for women throughout his career. He preferred the company of women and believed that "the human race ... must give way to the female instincts of nurturing ... if we are to have the smallest hope of surviving". His own efforts to help us survive were directed against the building of a nuclear power station near his home in Cornwall (he was successful), and turning a local sand-extraction plant into a nature reserve – a wonderful, real memorial to stand alongside his dramatic legacy.
Jill was by his side at the end. He is also survived by his four children, seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Christopher Morahan writes: Ken was a clever, compassionate writer and never once did his selfless talents distort the humanity of his vision and his loyalty to his material. The process of adaptation, of telling stories for a visual and popular medium is complex, requiring modesty, sympathy and intellectual rigour in discerning meanings and intentions. The adapter has to be both loyal and creative.
Often we are not aware of the liberties that can be taken, not to satisfy the individuality of the adapter, but to illuminate the intention of the original. From The Jewel in the Crown, I recall in particular the scene beside Mabel's grave between Barbie and a small Indian child, entirely of Ken's invention, inserted late in the production because both Jim O'Brien and I realised we had not given full richness to Barbie's story. The scene was entirely Ken's invention, yet utterly true to Scott.
The list of his superlative writing for women includes his memorable portraits of the Pankhurst family in Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), for which he wrote three scripts, catching the spirit of the times – both of the story and the 1970s when they were written. Finally, the world of Una, the 16-year-old in his last adaptation, Rumer Godden's Peacock Spring (1996), who is beguiled, betrayed and abandoned by India, is very touching. I speak with some authority, because I directed it and cast my daughter Hattie in the part. I had no doubts because I trusted the truth of the writing, Ken's compassion and honesty.
• Kenneth Heywood Taylor, screenwriter, born 10 November 1922; died 17 April 2011