Donner was born in West Hampstead, London. His father was a concert violinist and his mother ran a dress shop; his grandparents were Polish-Jewish immigrants. Donner began his filmmaking career while attending Kilburn Polytechnic. He began working in the film industry as a cutting-room assistant at Denham Studios, having gained the job after joining his father, who was at the studio to record the soundtrack for the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Donner did national service with the Royal Army Educational Corps, and afterwards was hired by Pinewood Studios as a film editor, where the movies he worked on included Scrooge, with Alastair Sim; The Card, with Alec Guinness; Genevieve, the comedy about a vintage car rally; The Million Pound Note, with Gregory Peck; and I Am a Camera, with Laurence Harvey.
He began his professional directing career on a number of low-budget films, including the crime drama The Secret Place about a troubled youth starring Belinda Lee, Ronald Lewis and David McCallum, Heart of a Child a melodrama starring Jean Anderson and Donald Pleasence, and Some People a film about a group of alienated youths who form their own rock band, starring Kenneth More and Ray Brooks. His television work during that time included episodes of Danger Man and Sir Francis Drake, as well as Mighty and Mystical, a documentary series about India.
1960s
Donner's breakthrough directing role came with The Caretaker, a film made with a low-budget funded almost entirely by financial contributions starting at £1,000 each from such individuals as Richard Burton, Noël Coward, Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor, with the stars bypassing their standard fees and taking shares of the film's revenue. The movie, based on the play of the same name by Harold Pinter, was filmed in black-and-white with cinematography by Nicolas Roeg. Donner's next film, Nothing but the Best, was a satire on the British class system starring Alan Bates and Denholm Elliott, based on a screenplay by Frederic Raphael. The film tells the story of Jimmy Brewster as a lower-class striver who seeks to move up in the system under the tutelage of his upper crust instructor Charlie Prince. Donner's first large-budget film was What's New Pussycat?, an American-financed comedy shot in France, starring Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers. O'Toole played the womanizer Michael James, who does his best to remain faithful to his fiancée Carole Werner, while numerous women — Ursula Andress, Capucine, Paula Prentiss — fall in love with him, with Sellers playing the role of his psychoanalyst, Dr. Fassbender. The success of the title song, performed by Tom Jones, added to the motion picture's success with audiences. Woody Allen, who wrote the screenplay and made his first screen appearance in the movie, hated the end result, commenting that the vision he had for the movie in his original script had been distorted. Donner's film Luv, an adaptation of the play by Murray Schisgal, starred Peter Falk, Jack Lemmon and Elaine May, but the addition of locations and characters to the original work led to criticism of the casting and direction, and the film was a commercial failure. Donner rounded out the 1960s with the 9th-century period pieceAlfred the Great, starring David Hemmings.
1970s
In 1973, Donner's essay into theatre, directing Robert Patrick's play Kennedy's Children at the King's Head Theatre, Islington was ultimately produced internationally. Donner directed the film Vampira, a comedy horror film of the vampire genre that sought to piggyback on the commercial success of Young Frankenstein for its US release. He directed the made-for-television movieSpectre, produced by Gene Roddenberry.
Donner died at age 84 on 7 September 2010 in London due to complications of Alzheimer's disease. His Australian wife, Jocelyn Rickards, a costume designer whom he met while working on Alfred the Great and married in 1969, had died in 2005.
