Sandy Whitelaw

Although born in London, Sandy Whitelaw had a long Scottish pedigree and his grandfather and great-grandfather were both Scottish-born Members of Parliament. Sandy was educated at the leading Swiss Boarding school Le Rosey, where he learned to ski. It was while serving two years National Service in the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) that Whitelaw helped the Army win the Inter-Services Ski Championship in 1950. He also finished second in the individual competition. Whitelaw followed that with an outstanding performance in winning the downhill and slalom in the team race between Cambridge and Oxford University.

Whitelaw attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied sociology and graduated from Harvard in 1955. The following year he captured the British Ski Championship, and then finished second in the Lowlanders Championship. Whitelaw was selected for the Cortina Winter Olympics and had the honour of captaining the British ski team.

Whitelaw then embarked on a career in the movies as an actor, producer, writer, director and, more famously, as the translator into English sub-titles of more than1,000 films. One of Whitelaw’s first jobs was as an assistant producer on the 1957 movie adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “A Farewell to Arms”. He then went on to work on some well-known films over the years including “Last Tango in Paris”, and the 1964 film based on the Tennessee Williams play, “The Night of the Iguana”, which starred Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, and Ava Gardner. It was widely reported that Whitelaw was in a brief relationship that year with Natalie Wood.

Whitelaw settled in Paris in the late 1970s and concentrated on his sub-title writing. He died in the city in 2015.