Vivian Matalon, Director of Stage and Screen, Dies at 88

Vivian Matalon, versatile director of stage and screen, died on August 15 at his home in Glenford, New York, as a result of complications from diabetes, according to his spouse, the playwright and actor Stephen Temperley. Matalon was 88.

Though he started out as an actor, Matalon became a much sought-after theater director. Notably, he directed Noël Coward in Suite in Three Keys (1966) — a trilogy of three Coward plays in which he also starred — in London, a version of which came to Broadway in 1974 as Noël Coward in Two Keys, starring Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Anne Baxter, and Thom Christopher.

He won a Tony Award for directing an acclaimed revival of Paul Osborn's Morning's at Seven in 1980, a year that saw him also directing a revival of Brigadoon and a production of Arthur Miller's The American Clock.

Other Broadway directing credits include a 1983 revival of Emlyn Williams's The Corn Is Green, starring Cicely Tyson, and Souvenir (2005), a play about the notoriously terrible soprano Florence Foster Jenkins written by Stephen Temperley.

He also continued to work in London's West End, directing Anna Massey in a 1965 production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, and Keir Dullea and Lee Remick in a 1970 production of William Inge's Bus Stop.

Matalon is survived by both Temperley and his sister, Lili Matalon.