Piers Inigo Haggard, OBE (18 March 1939 – 11 January 2023) was a British director who worked in film, television, and theatre. Early life Haggard was born in London, the son of Morna Gillespie and the actor, poet, and novelist Stephen Haggard. He was the great-great-nephew of the writer Sir Henry Rider Haggard. At the age of one, Haggard was evacuated with his mother and older brother Paul to New York where his paternal grandfather Godfrey Haggard was the British consul-general. Shortly after they left, his father wrote his sons a letter, which later that year was published in the Atlantic Monthly as "I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter to His Sons". Haggard and his mother returned to Britain after his brother's death from diphtheria. There a younger brother, Mark, was born. His father was a captain in the British Intelligence Corps. Sent to Egypt, he had an affair with a married woman and when she broke off the affair committed suicide in 1943. In 1946, Haggard’s mother remarried and the family moved to Muckhart Mill Farm in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. He attended school at Dollar Academy, and between 1956 and 1960 studied English at Edinburgh University, While there he was active in the dramatic society as an actor and director, and helped found the Festival Fringe Society in 1958. Career Haggard began his career as an assistant director at the Royal Court in 1960. In 1961, he was director of productions at the Dundee Rep including directing the pantomime Cinderella which was described by The Stage as “the best pantomime Dundee has seen in many years”. In 1962 he moved to the Glasgow Citizens, where productions included Albert Finney as Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV. He joined the first National Theatre company in 1963, where he co-directed with John Dexter and Bill Gaskill and assisted Laurence Olivier (1963 on Uncle Vanya, starring Michael Redgrave) and Franco Zeffirelli (1965 on Much Ado About Nothing, with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens). In 1965, he moved to BBC Television, directing plays for the anthology drama series Thirty-Minute Theatre and episodes of series such as The Newcomers, and Play for Today for the BBC, as well as Armchair Theatre, Callan, Man at the Top and Public Eye for ITV. He directed for a variety of programmes throughout the 1970s, such as The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Churchill's People, The Love School, Love