Bill Kenwright

Bill Kenwright, who has died aged 78 after a lengthy illness, combined the twin passions of football and theatre, as chairman of Everton FC and producer of more West End and touring shows than any of his contemporaries. On the road he sometimes cut corners and appeared a bit parsimonious with both the talent and his money. There was, however, never any doubt about his commitment to that talent, or his ingenuity in raising – and making – money, even though he finally succeeded, in early 2016, in finding the right billionaire to take over the club he had supported since boyhood. Having become the club’s largest shareholder and hugely popular chairman in 2004, in early 2016 he sold a 49.9% stake in Everton to the Iranian billionaire Fahrad Moshiri, who was formerly associated with Arsenal.
But splits in the boardroom, rumours, plans to move to a new ground – with a 52,888 stadium now under construction on the Liverpool waterfront to replace the antiquated Goodison Park – and the sale to Manchester United of the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney at the start of his chairmanship all contributed to high stress levels in Kenwright’s life. In recent months, he was effectively ousted by the money men and the proposed sale of the club to a major American company, 777 Partners.
As Everton’s fortunes on the field of play faltered, despite huge investment in new players, the supporters turned against Kenwright and his fellow directors, who followed police advice not to attend fixtures at Goodison Park. This must have been a monumental sadness and humiliation for him.
He kicked every ball, just as he breathed every song on the stage. Kenwright was all or nothing, and this, even at the cost of his health – chubby-faced, sallow-complexioned, he often looked exhausted – was the secret of his impish charm, and his considerable success. When he said he loved an actor, or a footballer, or even a manager, he wasn’t joking. He really did.
He transformed Willy Russell’s gutsy musical Blood Brothers, initially a modest West End success in 1983, into one of the longest-running shows of all time – it played for 24 years at the Phoenix in London and has been touring under Kenwright’s auspices more or less continuously since 1987. It also played for two years on Broadway, the presence of David Cassidy in the cast defying a shoal of hostile reviews. And as a result of his long-term friendship with Andrew Lloyd Webber, he was entrusted with the touring franchise – for 34 years – of the perennial Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, written by Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber.
He also entered into many valorous, not necessarily money-spinning, ventures, such as the salvation of Liverpool Playhouse when it was on its uppers in the 1990s, the presentation of the Peter Hall Company for many years when Hall had retired from running the National Theatre, and of the Royal Shakespeare Company (together with his fellow producer Thelma Holt) in an unlikely 2002 season of five tricky Jacobean plays at the Gielgud on Shaftesbury Avenue. And London audiences saw Judi Dench’s matchless Stratford-upon-Avon performance as the Countess of Roussillon in the 2003 production of All’s Well That Ends Well only because Kenwright presented it in the capital, challenging all former RSC company poster practice by putting Dench’s name above the title.
He was living the dream as much when Everton walked out at Wembley to play in the 2009 FA Cup final against Chelsea (they lost) as when he was taking Diana Rigg to Broadway in 1994 in an Almeida theatre revival of Euripides’ Medea. On first nights, he would sometimes sit in the stalls among the critics, shameless about trying to jolly them along. He was all bounce and enthusiasm, none of it phoney. He never believed his luck because he never forgot where he came from; but, boy, when he was worried, or disappointed, it showed.
Kenwright’s loyalty to Liverpool and his family was unshakeable. His father, Albert, was a bricklayer who became a successful builder, and his mother, Hope (nee Jones), was at the centre of his adult life. He was educated at Booker Avenue county primary school and then at Liverpool Institute high school (1957-64, alongside Paul McCartney and George Harrison). There he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and joined the National Youth Theatre during the holidays.
Though he won a place to read drama at Manchester University, he preferred to work as a call boy at Liverpool Playhouse. He had ideas of becoming a record producer after launching a short career as a pop singer in a group called the Chevrolets, then another called Bill Kenwright and the Runaways. But he spent the second half of the 1960s as an actor, after (as he put it) bluffing his way into the Granada television studios and eventually landing the role of Gordon Clegg in Coronation Street; he played the part, on and off, from 1968 to 1982, by which time he was established as a theatre producer, and with brief reappearances in 1995 and 2012.
As a producer he began with a tentative tour of Billy Liar of which the authors, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, approved, and then started in earnest with productions featuring Corrie stalwarts Reginald Marsh (who played the bookie Dave Smith) and Anne Reid (Valerie Barlow), hiring Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliott, themselves just starting out as producers, as his general managers. Another Corrie star, Pat Phoenix, packed theatres round the country in The Miracle Worker (1970). Kenwright, Weldon and Elliott blazed a new trail on the touring circuit while establishing a foothold in the West End.
In 1972 Kenwright produced the first major touring revival of West Side Story, starring James Smillie, the Australian headliner, and had his first West End flop with Elleston Trevor’s A Touch of Purple (with another Oz favourite, Ray Barrett). His portfolio broadened with original musicals on tour (diminished, low-budget versions of Starlight Express and Evita) and, more successfully, and more profitably, juke-box compilation and tribute shows revisiting the back catalogues of Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran (Be Bop a Lula in the 1980s was the best of them).
At the same time, there was always a tour doing the rounds featuring Kenwright’s favourite television star actors. This stable included Hannah Gordon, Roy Marsden, who also took to directing, and Martin Shaw; Gordon and Shaw, together with John Stride, starred in a fine revival of The Country Girl by Clifford Odets at the Apollo in 1983. Successes like that, and well-regarded presentations in the early 1990s of Giles Havergal’s sprightly adaptation of Travels With My Aunt and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa helped soften the blow of later, well-intentioned risks that nosedived: Janie Dee in the 2009 West End revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind and, the same year, Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England and Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of On the Waterfront.
With the Peter Hall Company in the 1990s, there was something of the National Theatre on the road about their 16 shows over seven years together, before they fell out badly, on the eve of a big provincial tour. Productions included Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, in 1992, Elaine Paige in Pam Gems’s Piaf the following year, and full-blooded revivals of She Stoops to Conquer, Hay Fever and Lysistrata.
For someone with unapologetic popular taste – he was obsessively knowledgeable about westerns and rock’n’roll – Kenwright further enhanced his high-end reputation with some notable classic affiliations: his production of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House in 1996 went to Broadway and won Tony awards for both the director Anthony Page and Janet McTeer as Nora; Page also directed a fine 2003 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Ashley Judd and Brendan Fraser, and that, too, Kenwright took to Broadway.
He hired Robin Phillips to direct the American film star Jessica Lange and Charles Dance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Lyric, 2000), followed by Woody Harrelson and Jenny Seagrove (by then his constant companion) in the trickier Williams play Night of the Iguana (Lyriuc, 2005). Lange returned ifor his production of another Williams classic, The Glass Menagerie (Apollo, 2007), directed by Rupert Goold.
With subsidised theatre, he took the commercial risk on, and transferred, work that he admired, such as Rufus Norris’s brilliant staging of Festen at the Almeida (2004) or John Tiffany’s creepy production of Let the Right One In at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2014; the latter show packed out in the West End, but Kenwright still lost money after a limited run. He had more return on Norris’s 2006 sexually explicit revival of Cabaret, which he reanimated six years later at the Savoy, and on tour, with Will Young as the leering Emcee; and on a superb revival of Twelve Angry Men that toured with Tom Conti after Shaw had led the Birmingham Rep production into the Garrick in 2013.
Another of Kenwright’s idols was Tommy Steele. Over the decades, in recurring revivals, he presented the tooth-flashing twinkle-toes in Singin’ in the Rain, Scrooge: The Musical and a touring tribute show to Glenn Miller.
His few films include Lewis Gilbert’s Stepping Out (1991) with Liza Minnelli and Julie Walters; Stephen Frears’s Chéri (2009), adapted from Colette by Christopher Hampton, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend; and Norris’s Broken (2012), a gem of a small-budget movie with Cillian Murphy, Tim Roth and Rory Kinnear.
Kenwright, who was appointed CBE in 2001, was married from 1978 to 1980 to the actor and designer Anouska Hempel, and had a daughter, Lucy, from his relationship with the actor Virginia Stride. In 1994 Seagrove became his life partner in the theatre and in the football stands.
He is survived by Jenny, Lucy, two grandchildren, and his nephew, Adam, who is now a leading producer himself.
Bill (William) Kenwright, theatre producer and football club chairman, born 4 September 1945; died 23 October 2023