Timothy Burrill

Timothy Peckover Burrill was born on 8 June 1931 in St Asaph, Denbighshire, in north Wales. He was educated at Eton College and later served in the Grenadier Guards, according to The Times obituary. Before entering films he worked in the shipping industry on the docks at Birkenhead and Liverpool, where his lifelong fondness for Eccles cakes is said to have begun, and then spent a couple of years working in the City of London.

Burrill was an Old Etonian. He had no formal film school training and learned his trade on the job, first with a documentary production company from 1956 and then as an assistant director and production manager on British feature films. Late in life he returned to Eton, in November 2019, to give a careers talk to pupils as part of the school's VocSoc seminar series.

Burrill entered the film industry in 1956 and spent three years with a company making documentary films. In the early 1960s he worked as an assistant director and production manager on British features including On the Fiddle, The Cracksman, Night Must Fall (1964), The Yellow Rolls-Royce and The Heroes of Telemark.

He moved into producing as associate producer on Laurence Olivier's Three Sisters and on Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971). He produced Alpha Beta with Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts, organised post-production on The Three Musketeers, and was production supervisor on Superman (1978).

In 1978 he formed Burrill Productions to co-produce Polanski's Tess with Claude Berri's Renn Productions, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. As managing director of Allied Stars he was responsible for financing Chariots of Fire and Breaking Glass. He co-produced The Pirates of Penzance (1983) and produced Supergirl (1984) and The Fourth Protocol (1987).

From the late 1980s he specialised in Anglo-French co-productions, working with Claude Berri and Alain Sarde on films including The Lover (1992) and Swimming Pool (2003). In 1997 he was head of production at Pathe Pictures UK when Pathe won a UK National Lottery film franchise. He was executive producer of Polanski's The Pianist (2002) and Oliver Twist (2005), co-producer of The Ghost Writer (2010), and executive producer of Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (2011). His later co-productions also included Two Brothers, Renaissance and La Vie en Rose.

Burrill served as vice-chairman for film of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and then as its chairman from 1981 to 1983. On his death BAFTA said it was deeply saddened to hear that its former chair had died. Colleagues credited him with helping to steer important film policy changes through successive governments.

According to his IMDb biography, Burrill was married to Philippa Hare from 1959 to 1965, a marriage that produced one child, and married Santa Wolfe in 1968. Further details of his family have not been made public. Friends and collaborators remembered him as affable, patrician, self-effacing and a great raconteur of stories about the films he had worked on.

Burrill was a committed internationalist who believed passionately in Britain's ability to make international films and in the UK as a European co-production partner. In his 2019 Eton talk he spoke warmly of the vibrancy of the UK film industry, encouraged students to join film clubs and consider the BFI residential programme and the National Film and Television School, and reflected on the impact of streaming services and computer-generated imagery, while being candid about the long hours and periods of unemployment the work can bring.

David Puttnam called him "unquestionably one of the unsung heroes of both British and European cinema of the 1970s and '80s" and a pioneer of Anglo-French co-production. His credits span Superman, Tess, Chariots of Fire, The Pianist and La Vie en Rose, and his long partnership with Polanski ran from Macbeth in 1971 to the documentary memoir of 2011.

Burrill and Claude Berri were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for Tess at the 53rd Academy Awards. Films he helped finance, produce or co-produce won major honours, including the Best Picture Oscar for Chariots of Fire, the Palme d'Or for The Pianist and the European Film Award for Best Film for The Ghost Writer.

No personal controversies involving Burrill have been reported.

Burrill died on 23 July 2026, aged 95. The place and cause of death have not been made public. A death notice appeared in The Telegraph on 28 July 2026, Screen Daily published tributes from collaborators on 30 July 2026, and The Times published an obituary on 31 August 2026.