Voytek, who has died aged 89, brought distinctive vitality and creative adaptability to productions for theatre, film and television. His work ranged from theatre design to credits as a director, producer and writer of TV drama. In the 1960s and 70s, he directed episodes of Callan, Man at the Top, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Frankenstein and Special Branch. He was producer for The Pilgrim's Progress (1967), and wrote Judas (1966) and Two's a Crowd (1978). But Voytek is best remembered for the many elegant masterstrokes of production design that resulted from his sharp wit and incisive analysis of a screenplay.
He was dubbed Voytek by the theatre director George Devine, who deemed it more memorable than his given name, Wojciech Roman Pawel Jerzy Szendzikowski. Son of Wadysaw, a doctor, and Maria, Wojciech was born and brought up in Warsaw. Fighting with partisans during the second world war, he was awarded the Military Cross for his valour in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. For the rest of his life he enjoyed a unique sense of humour fuelled by the absurdities of class and politics, and the lessons he had learned as a young man witnessing the horrors of war. He miraculously survived the near obliteration of the three separate battalions in which he served, and being shot in the shoulder and held as a prisoner of war in Germany.
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