Susie Figes obituary | film

Susie Figgis, who has died of cancer aged 77, was one of Britain’s most respected casting directors, setting young actors such as Greta Scacchi, Cathy Tyson, Jodie May and Emily Woof on the path to stardom.

Her inspired suggestions to film directors also included casting Ben Kingsley in the role of Gandhi (1982), helping to bring Richard Attenborough’s dream project to life, and having Terence Stamp play the devil driving a cream Rolls-Royce in The Company of Wolves (1984), Angela Carter’s fantasy horror story directed by Neil Jordan.

But her greatest accomplishment came when she and the cast watched tens of thousands of children search for the three young heroes in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). She visited schools across Britain and Ireland.

Daniel Radcliffe, who was eventually cast as Harry, had already been spotted by David Heyman, the producer who brought JK Rowling’s boy wizard to the screen for US film giant Warner Bros. He saw Radcliffe as a 10-year-old in the 1999 BBC film adaptation of David Copperfield, playing the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel as a child.

However, Figgis, who remembers saying, “Oh my God, it’s going to be good!”, had to tell director Chris Columbus that Radcliffe’s father, a literary agent, and mother, a casting agent, objected if it meant a move to Los Angeles.

She herself has always been aware of the potential pitfalls in catapulting children to fame. “You can ruin their lives if you’re not careful,” she said. “Children who are good at a particular role often do not become adult actors.”

Figgis and her colleagues began searching for another candidate to play Harry Potter, as well as Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger and their school friends, with the firm brief of only seeing children aged nine to 11 years old. The requirement for casting adults was that they be British or Irish, and Warner finally settled on filming in Britain.

Rupert Grint began his long round of auditions as Ron by sending in a homemade video of him performing a rap song, while Emma Watson auditioned alongside others at her school in Oxford to play Hermione. They both appeared only in school plays, without any professional experience.

When Warner was still unsatisfied with potential candidates for the lead role – after more than 40,000 boys had been considered – Figgis withdrew from the production. But her faith in Bradcliffe was justified when Columbus and Warner returned to the idea of ​​casting him in the role he played in all eight films. It also launched Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson into careers that lasted into adulthood.

Figes was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Shirley (née King), an antiques restorer, and Brian Figes, a lawyer who had his own practice there and was the Irish-born son of the former KC. Susie’s cousin, Mike Figgis, became a director on such films as Leaving Las Vegas.

When Susie was ten, in late British colonial rule, the family moved to Britain and she attended Whispers School, West Sussex, where her anti-establishment stance led to several clashes with the headmaster. She always felt like an outsider, and later said: “I was never part of the fashion scene in London. I saw things differently.”

She began her career as a touring actress in a London-based experimental theater group, The People Show, alongside her cousin Mike, before having the opportunity to work as assistant director Miriam Brickman in the film The Mission (1977), starring Christopher Plummer.

Figgis then struck out on her own as a director for television with the gritty drama Bloody Kids and film with The Wildcats of St Trinian’s and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (all 1980).

Her break came with Gandhi. Persuading Attenborough to dispense with ideas of casting a white actor in the lead role, she eventually suggested Kingsley, who won an Oscar for his performance.

And in the more than 100 films that followed, Figgis was equally adept at spotting new talent. Scacchi as the wife of a British colonial official who causes a scandal in India in Heat and Dust (1983), Tyson as an upscale sex worker in Mona Lisa (1986) and Woof as Robert Carlyle’s ex-wife in The Full Monty (1997) are just a few examples.

Visiting schools often paid off, as when she discovered Lena Headey for the role of Mary the Younger in Waterland (1992). It also brought international fame to Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

Among the directors who kept returning to Figes was Jordan more than a dozen times (mostly with producer Stephen Woolley). The association began with The Company of Wolves, which starred Sarah Patterson, barely out of her teens, as Rosaleen and Angela Lansbury as Granny, and included The Crying Game (1992) and Michael Collins (1996).

Another frequent collaborator was director Tim Burton on films such as Sleepy Hollow (1991), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which featured a 12-year-old Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and the live-action remake Dumbo (2019), with Nico Parker, also 12 years old.

Figes found another 12-year-old girl, Judy May, at a school in Camden, London, to play the outcast daughter of a South African anti-apartheid activist in A World Apart (1988), after she had visited the country to star in Attenborough’s Cry for Freedom (1987).

Between the two, she began her secret and passionate support for the anti-apartheid cause. She was recruited by the exiled Eleanor Cassrils in London into an underground network, where she relayed secret communications, transferred money and provided a safe house for ANC supporters passing through. One of these, Bill Anderson, who arrived in 1988, became her husband two years later.

She is survived by him, their daughter Anu, and her stepdaughter Ntsiki.