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Bernard Pivot, the country’s unofficial
literary czar, who presided over the in-
fluential television show Apostrophes.
This led to his becoming something of a
media personality. He was a regular
contributor to Le Fou du Roi, a daily
two-hour show on France Inter, where
participants gossiped, provoked and
fought to top each other’s jokes.
In 1993 he received a call from Barry
Hanson, who had produced one of his
television plays on BBC2 years earlier.
The corporation had acquired the
rights to Peter Mayle’s bestseller A Year
In Provence, and wondered if Sadler
would be interested in adapting it as a
12-part series starring John Thaw and
Lindsay Duncan. It was a daunting pro-
spect because even though the book
had lots of charm as a diary there was
no evident storyline. Sadler worked dil-
igently and with great skill on the
project. The result was poorly received
in the UK, yet became a hit in America.
Shortly before the turn of the
century, while staying with their friend
David Ambrose in Provence, he andLulu met the actor John Malkovich,
who had a house near by. Malkovich,
who spoke good French though less flu-
ently than Sadler, was keen to direct the
English play Hysteria by Terry Johnson
in Paris with the actor Pierre Vaneck
playing Sigmund Freud.
Mick and Lulu Sadler were signed up
to make a French translation of the
play, which opened in 2002 and ran for
six months at the Théâtre Marigny on
the Champs Élysées. Malkovich and
the Sadlers went on to collaborate on
an American play, Good Canary, which
opened in Paris in 2007. The production
won a “best of year” award and the
Sadlers a “best adaptation” award at the
Molières, the French equivalent of the
Oliviers.
In 2006 he was awarded the Legion
d’Honneur for services to literature and
the arts. The presentation took place at
the British embassy in Paris. In his ac-
ceptance speech Sadler thanked,
among others, his late mother Joan for
infecting him with her own love of
theatre. A largely self-educated
woman, her dream of being a play-
wright had been thwarted by constant
rejection letters, until one day in the
mid-1950s she was informed that not
only had her new play been accepted by
a leading management, but it was to be
directed by Peter Hall and would star
Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
It was a dream realised, but short-
lived when the play closed on tour with-
out reaching the West End. It neverthe-
less gave Sadler as well as his mother a
sense of the thrill of it all, something
that never left him and which he
successfully passed on to his director-
screenwriter daughter, Daisy.
A good observer on the differences
between the French and the Rosbifs, his
last play, Brexit Sentimental, will be per-
formed posthumously at the Avignon
Festival this summer. It is about an En-
glish couple and a French couple at a
dinner party in the French countryside
on the evening of the referendum.
Sadler was a boisterous, gregarious
and generous personality who died
after suffering a heart attack over
lunch. At the time he was raising a glass
to toast an old friend’s birthday.Michael Sadler, academic, was born on
January 11, 1943. He died of heart failure
on February 23, 2022, aged 79Targo Florio, he won the Nürburgring
1,000km and in July he made his Formu-
la One debut at the French Grand Prix.
Competing in a Cooper T86B, the slow-
est car in the field, Elford finished fourth
in the pouring rain.
Quiet and intense with deep-setMick Sadler
Francophile playwright, academic and committed bon viveur who started out performing comedy with Michael Palin at Oxford
Vic Elford
Versatile British racing driver who competed in rallies and Formula One and doubled for Steve McQueen in his film Le Mans
“Quick Vic’” Elford’s race was effective-
ly over. In May 1968 he had blown a tyre
on the first lap of the Targa Florio rally
in Sicily. He started the second lap of the
44-mile circuit 18 minutes behind. “I
thought ‘that’s it, there’s no possibility I
can win the race but I’m going to make
damn sure that every lap is a record’.”
The oldest car race in the world
(started in 1906) was more treacherous
than a mafia turf war in the olive groves
surrounding the route. Hugging cliff-
tops winding through the hills above
Palermo, the race ended in 1977 because
it was considered too dangerous. Elf-
ord’s victory by more than a minute
confirmed his reputation as one of the
greatest of all mountain drivers.
The year 1968 was the British driver’s
annus mirabilis and also exemplified his
versatility. In January he won the Mon-
te Carlo rally, skidding his Porsche 911S
around the snowy hills of the circuit. A
week later he won the 24 hours of Day-
tona in a Porsche 908 oversteering
through the sharp turns on the high
banking of the Nascar circuit in Florida.
Two weeks after his triumph at the
brown eyes, Elford was among the first
drivers to write out detailed “pace
notes” of routes and could memorise
long stretches quickly. “Modern pace
notes developed with my co-driver
David Stone got us to the point where I
could drive over a road I had never seen
in fog or at night flat out,” he said.
As well as rallying, Formula One and
sports car racing, he competed in the
marathon Trans-Am and Can-Am ra-
ces through America and Canada and
off-road events in Africa. Across the
world, Elford was a familiar sight gar-
landed in laurels, trophy in hand, smil-
ing broadly as he puffed on a cigarette.
He was a natural choice to double for
Steve McQueen in close-up driving se-
quences of the 1971 film Le Mans. The
American actor could be taciturn but
was unfailingly “laid back and charm-
ing” with Elford. They talked about
motor racing incessantly.
The next year Elford was racing at Le
Mans for real but stopped when he saw
a burning Ferrari. He opened the door
of the vehicle but luckily the driver, Flo-
rian Vetsch, had escaped. In the forest-ed area beyond he found his friend Joe
Bonnier dead — his Lola had collided
with the Ferrari and he was catapulted
over the crash barrier. For his humani-
ty, Elford was named Chevalier de l’Or-
dre National du Mérite by President
Pompidou. Soon afterwards he retired
as a driver.
Victor Henry Elford was born in
Peckham, southeast London, in 1935
and educated at Alleyn’s School in Dul-
wich. He had wanted to be a racing
driver ever since his father took him to
the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in
1948, but was told that the sport was the
reserve of well-heeled young men with
lots of money. Instead, he became a
sales engineer.
His entrée into motor racing arrived
in the mid-1950s when a friend’s
mother won a lottery. Elford became
co-driver and navigator at rallies in his
friend’s MG.
By 1960, at the relatively late age of 24,
he was given his own drive rallying in
Minis, then DKW Juniors. He signed for
Ford in 1964 and drove the original
“souped-up” Cortina with great success.He later signed for Porsche and imme-
diately proved his mettle by winning a
class at the Le Mans 24-hour race in- Eflord won renown as one of the
only drivers to tame the fearsome Por-
sche 917 at its top speed of 240mph.
After retiring as a driver, he led the
Inaltera rallying team and managed the
ATS Formula One team.
Elford moved to Florida in 1982,
where he remained for the rest of his
life, running driving schools for Por-
sche. His Porsche High-Performance
Driving Handbook became a bestseller.
Elford had married Mary in 1963 and
they brought up two adopted sons, Paul
and Martin. He is survived by his
second wife Anita.
He did not miss motor racing and in
later years proved that he had no “need
for speed” by driving a Ford Escort.
Vic Elford, racing driver, was born on
June 10, 1935. He died of cancer on
March 13, 2022, aged 86Vic Elford at the Laguna circuit in 1970Email: [email protected]Mick Sadler’s fellow writer-performers
at Oxford, including the future Pythons
Michael Palin and Terry Jones, were
shocked when he announced one day
that he was intending to forsake a
potentially brilliant career in comedy in
favour of one in academia.
“He was very distinctive,” Palin re-
called, “with a round expressive face
and a head of fair curly hair which gave
him the air of an absent-minded profes-
sor. He was energetic, both intellectual-
ly and physically, and his slightly pro-
truding eyes sparkled as ideas spilled
out of him.”
The two acted in various shows and
Palin directed him in The Oxford Line,
the university revue at the Edinburgh
Festival in 1965. “Mick’s forte was play-
ing with words and ideas. He had a fine
sense of the surreal, turning the mun-
dane domestic world on its
head — a couple who’d won
the Hanging Gardens Of
Babylon and didn’t know
where they were going to
hang them, a cat who’d been
wrongly adjusted and could
only go sideways.” He was a
clever physical performer, too.
“One of his tours de force was
the conductor of an orchestra
whose baton becomes a knit-
ting needle, a starting-handle,
a dipstick, a nail file and finally
a sword elaborately wielded
before running through an im-
aginary assailant over whom
he steps, bows to the audience
and goes off.”
But it wasn’t to be, and comedy’s loss
was academia’s gain. After graduating
in 1965, Sadler stayed on at his college,
Magdalen, to read for a doctorate in
French and German literature. He then
took up a post as lecturer in French at
the University of Glasgow. There he
met and married Lulu Chabriais, in
1970, and the couple spent only two
nights apart in the next 52 years.
In 1979 they moved to France, where
he became professor of French litera-
ture at the University of London Insti-
tute in Paris, specialising in contempo-
rary film and theatre. Notwithstanding
a heavy teaching schedule, he con-
tinued to write prolifically. Translations
of Marivaux and Musset into English
were accompanied by academic arti-
cles, some more tongue-in-cheek than
others. “The role of soup in French
cinema between 1938 and 1953” was
never meant to be received with great
solemnity.
Completely bilingual, he was one of
the few non-French writers aside from
Samuel Beckett to adopt French as
effectively his first language. In 1996 he
co-wrote the screenplay for a French
film, C’est Jamais Loin, starring Jean-
Louis Tringtignant.
There followed three comic novels
which explored his love of French food,
wine and culture. He translated them
into English himself, occasionally ring-
ing up an English friend to be reminded
how best to say this or that in his slightly
rusty native tongue. The books were
published in the UK by Simon & Schu-
ster, the first of them bringing a hand-
written letter from the Prince of Wales,saying that he hadn’t laughed so hard
in years.
Michael Peter Sadler was born in
Lewes, East Sussex, in 1943, the son
of Joan Sadler, a writer, and Brian
Sadler, a civil servant. He attended
Lewes Grammar School and complet-
ed his doctoral thesis on the French
symbolist poets in Paris. During the ri-
ots of 1968, he had to abandon a re-
hearsal of The Importance of Being Ear-
nest because of tear gas in the room.
At Oxford, despite his announce-
ment about becoming an academic, he
had continued to write, direct and per-
form in various productions for the uni-
versity’s Oxford Theatre Group. Dur-
ing the Seventies he wrote several
quirky radio plays which were champi-
oned and directed by the BBC producer
John Tydeman, one of them winning a
Sony award. He also wrote a handful of
television plays, two of which were di-
rected by Philip Saville, and attracted
star names including Diana Rigg, Ger-
aldine McEwan and Arthur Lowe.
In France Sadler was taken up byWith John Malkovich in 2007 and left, front centre, with his Oxford comedy group‘Mick’s forte was
playing with
words and ideas.
He had a fine
sense of the
surreal’
s
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