Martin Landau's last exit

At Golders Green crematorium this morning we paid our last respects to Martin Landau, a great West End theatrical impresario of the1950s and 1960s and one of the last links to the influential theatre figures driven to Britain by the Nazi persecution of German Jews.

A prolific producer of plays and musicals, whose collaborators included the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein and Margaret Thatcher's playwright speechwriter, Sir Ronald Millar, he brought the novels of C.P. Snow and the musical, Robert and Elizabeth to the West End stage. But he was a man who never forgot that he had been 'born twice', the first time in Berlin in October 1924 to a family of Jewish jewellers and the second time in England in March,1939, when he arrived alone at Victoria station with a green velvet identifying label and a few pieces of his cello smashed en route by the Gestapo.

Landau's foster parents were Oxford Quakers with whom he learnt the English language and a deep love of England. He later served in the RAF in North Africa and began his stage  career in 1945 by building a theatre in Wadi Halfa, Sudan. After training as a director at the RADA, he became a champion of regional repertory theatre in the 1950s and put on dozens of plays in Rochdale, Stockport, Cleethorpes, Bridlington as well as London and Glasgow. He believed that the decline of regional 'rep' was a major loss to the British theatre, one which he blamed on the growth of the Arts Council and the accompanying culture of subsidy.

His West End productions included shows starring Leslie Henson and Dandy Nichols; he helped to launch the career of Patrick MacGoohan whose role in Philip King's Serious Charge, apioneering study of homosexual blackmail, was highly praisedby Orson Welles in 1955.One of his biggest hits was The Masters, a 1964 adaptation of the novel by C.P.Snow about the competition between two dons, a traditionalist and moderniser,to become the Master of a Cambridge College.

The playwright who adapted The Masters was Ronald Millar who became Landau's closest lifetime friend. With the composer, Ron Grainer, they went on to produce the musical Robert and Elizabeth, based on the story ofthepoet lovers,Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. The show, directed by Wendy Toye, starred Keith Michell and another of Landau's close friends, Sir John Clements, and ran for almost a thousand performances from October 1964.

In 1966, as theatre producers began to grapple with the 'youth culture' of the age, Landau and Millar worked with Brian Epstein on the musical On the Level whose subject was a school scandal in which pupils receievd the right answers before they had sat their examinations.The Times linked On the Level with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Charlie Girl as developments of which most emphatically it did not approve.

The production and its 'teenage Martians', as The Times described them, opened in Liverpool, the home of the Epstein music empire. Landau was impressed by his partner's skills with the media, less so with his equal preference for grapplingwith a Spanish boy bull-fighter when he was supposed to glad-handing the mayor. The two men had cooperated succesfully on a season of plays in Dublin but fell into dispute over the price that Epstein wanted to charge the On the Level production for the London theatre whose lease Epstein himself held. For Landau this was not a happy experience.

Landau had always had an acute sense of politics and an ability to see through the cant of politicians. When Millar became the most significant of thespeech-writers and presentational advisers for Margaret Thatcher, Landau lent his friend his political as well as theatrical instincts. The two men spoke on the telephone almost every night until Millar's death in 1998 - and as the crematorium audience heard today, many of Millar's greatest speaches for Thatcher came in cooperation with Landau's very remarkable and penetrating mind.

Landau was an inspired and devoted teacher of the dramatic arts, working with pupils almost up to his death, many of whom thanked him today. Some of his life remained mysterious to the end - and there was much exchanging of notes in the tea-room. His extended theatrical family, centred on the actors' agent and producer, Audrey and Joanne Benjamin, who became the third family of his life. He died with Libya in his mind and on his lips, Joanne told us. He had long been a watchful student of resurgent anti-semitism and Islamic extremism in the Middle East, who never  forgot the 31 members of his first family who died in Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz - and the mountains of gold and jewellery which his parents and their fellow Jews of Breslau had first to bring to the black-uniformed men at the town hall.