Robert Fox obituary

Film and theatre producer who made The Audience the starting point for The Crown, and was behind Another Country, The Lady in the Van, Iris and Notes on a Scandal Scion of one of the great theatrical dynastic families, Robert Fox, who has died aged 73, was a producer on stage and screen over a period of 50 years. He started out as an apprentice stage manager at the Royal Court theatre in London in the early 1970s and soon made telling creative relationships with the elite of British actors and writers. His crowning glory was, well, The Crown (2016-23), the Netflix television blockbuster series on which he was an executive producer alongside his British counterparts Stephen Daldry and Matthew Byam Shaw. The series, written by Peter Morgan, sprang from Fox’s association as producer on Morgan’s stage play The Audience (2013), directed by Daldry and starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. That play anatomised, fictionally, the private weekly meetings between the monarch and a succession of prime ministers from her accession to 2013 – Winston Churchill to David Cameron – wittily conceived with a satirical edge and magical sleight-of-hand onstage royal costume changes. Fox had first