The theatre, film and television director and former head of RTÉ drama, Louis Lentin, has died at the age of 80 after a sudden illness. His pioneering work won many awards and he made a major contribution to Irish cultural life for nearly half a century.
The chair of the Arts Council, Sheila Pratschke, said: “His was a strong and brave voice and his documentaries, in particular, shone a light on a number of issues close to his heart.” According to RTÉ director general Noel Curran, Lentin “was passionate about the impact and medium of television and he left a truly impressive legacy of work”.
His last production for RTÉ was Grandpa, Speak to Me in Russian, the story of his paternal grandfather Kalman Lentin, who came to Ireland from Lithuania in the 1890s, as had many of Dublin's Jewish community. He made his living as a travelling pedlar, had a scrapyard in Limerick and Lentin was very close to him.
Eldest of six Louis Lentin was born in Limerick, the eldest of six children of Issac and Hyacinth Lentin. His father owned a women’s tailoring business and his mother was a sister of Gerald Goldberg, who later became Lord Mayor of Cork.
The two eldest Lentin children – Louis and his sister Fay – went to a convent nursery school in Limerick, but after the nuns called to their home to ask their parents if, as the children seemed so enthusiastic about the Christmas nativity play, they could please convert them, their parents moved them to St Michael’s, a Protestant primary school in Barrington Street. They were also singled out there as the only two Jewish children in the school.
In 1943, the family moved to Dublin, and Lentin attended the Methodist-run Rathgar National School, where he was happy. He was less happy in Wesley College, where he felt ostracised as a Jew. He was quite an accomplished tennis player at Maccabi Sports Club.
He went to Trinity College to study medicine but was more interested in the Trinity Players, which he ran for a few years. His interest in the theatre meant he did not complete his medical studies.
He graduated with a BA in 1957, became a theatre director and quickly established himself by setting up Art Theatre Productions in 1959, which produced the Irish premieres of Beckett's Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape. A notable production for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1961 was The Voice of Shem, an adaptation of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which went on to play in Paris and London.
In 1961, Hilton Edwards, head of drama in Teilifís Éireann, invited him to join the fledgling station.
He worked as a floor manager and then news director, eventually working his way to directing mostly drama productions, most notably Insurrection in 1966, a dramatic day-by-day reconstruction of the Easter Rising, scripted by Hugh Leonard.
Among his TV productions were plays by Leonard, Eugene McCabe, Maeve Binchy, Dominic Behan and Seán O’Casey – a 13-part adaptation of his autobiographies.
He went to Israel after the 1967 war where he was asked to join the nascent TV station.
He trained directors and producers and produced a number of programmes, including a series of Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian Masses from Bethlehem. While working in Israeli television, he met Ronit Saltzberger, who was from Haifa, and they married there in 1969.
They returned to Ireland and Lentin resumed his work with RTÉ.
New plays He won the Jacobs' Irish Critics' Award for contribution to television drama in 1973, and in 1978 was appointed head of television drama in RTÉ. Two of his innovations in that position were the Thursday Play Date and The Sunday Series. In this role, he was responsible for many plays by Irish writers.
In 1989, he left RTÉ and established an independent production company, Crescendo Concepts, which produced several noteworthy documentaries, especially Dear Daughter (1996), which told of the harrowing experiences of Christine Buckley and others in Goldenbridge residential school, run by the Sisters of Mercy.
Another notable production was No More Blooms, an exploration of the unsympathetic Irish government attitude to the Jewish refugee problem during the Nazi era in Germany.
Lentin won many national and international awards for his work, including the Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and Television Festival and a Banff nomination for Dear Daughter.
No More Blooms also won a US International Film and Television Award.
For The Work of Angels (2000), which explores the wonders of the Book of Kells, he won awards at New York Festival, Montreal Arts Festival and a Banff nomination for Best Arts Documentary. Ár Dover Féin, a documentary about "tatie hokers" from Achill in Scotland, won the Connaught Gold/John Healy Award and gold at the HeustonWorldFest.
He was writing his memoir, entitled Dream On, when his last illness overtook him.
He is survived by his wife Ronit and his children Alana and Miki.