By Mervyn Rothstein
01 Mar 2009

In addition to his Tony double feat in 2001, Blakemore was nominated one other time as Best Director of a play and a musical in the same year — in 1990 for Lettice and Lovage and City of Angels. In England he has been a regular directing presence in the West End. He was an associate director for five years under Olivier at the National Theatre and then under Sir Peter Hall for two years.

Of Blithe Spirit, in which a remarried novelist invites to his house a medium who conjures up the spirit of his late wife, he says, "It's a good time for it. It's a very entertaining, very clever show that stands up very well. It was written during the Second World War simply to beguile and amuse and cheer up the audience. Now we're in the middle of an extremely alarming financial meltdown, and if we have any luck, the play will have the same effect as when it was first produced."

Looking back, Blakemore says, "I've been very lucky. I've had two remarkable playwrights — Peter Nichols and Michael Frayn — who have been very happy with the way I've done their plays. They have been great collaborators."

Does he have any regrets? "I wish I would have made more films. And I wish I had written more. I think if I had continued to be an actor I would have written a string of books."

But looking ahead, he says, he is happy to continue directing. "I've mainly made my name with new work, rather than doing Shakespeare or the classics. I'm always looking for something that really excites me, that is a little bit groundbreaking. That's really what would still get me going, something that lands on my desk that is fresh and exciting that relates to today."

And, he says, these hard times may have an unexpectedly beneficial effect for the theatre. "The disaster that we're going through is conducive to the arts," he says. "A lot of people are doing a lot of hard thinking. Audiences are starting to look for explanations. I think we're going to see a lot of truthful reexaminations of the recent past and of the way we’ve all been living."