Playwright, screenwriter and director who found success off-Broadway in the 1960s
Although he came to prominence in the off-Broadway counterculture melting pot of Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Israel Horovitz, who has died of cancer aged 81, was an Anglophile who trained at Rada, spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company as their resident dramatist and had many plays performed on BBC Radio.
He was also dubbed the most produced American playwright in French theatre history. So it was a special pleasure to him that his last screenplay – and debut as a film director – My Old Lady (2014) starring Maggie Smith and Kevin Kline, was based on one of his own “French” plays and co-produced by the BBC.