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| Cate Haste | |
Cate Haste, the historian, author and filmmaker who wrote eight books over the course of her career and directed many documentary series, has died at age 75, the Guardian reported. The cause of death was lung cancer.
Her career in television began with the six-part documentary series The Day Before Yesterday, which aired from 1969 to 1970. The six-part series delved into British history from 1945 to 1959, and for it Haste served as a researcher and associate producer.
Haste's first book was Keep the Home Fires Burning, which was published in 1977 and discussed British propaganda in World War I. She made her directorial debut that same year with The Secret War, about scientific and engineering advances during World War II.
She wrote Rules of Desire, about the history of sex post-World War I, in 1992. Sex was a subject to which she often returned--Haste directed six documentaries about sexual freedom in Britain throughout her career.
In 1998, she directed five episodes of the 24-part series Cold War, a BBC Two/CNN co-production that spanned 1945 to 1991. She filmed in the United States and in Prague, and both George H.W. Bush and Václav Havel contributed to her episodes.
She went on to co-write The Goldfish Bowl with Cherie Booth, the wife of Tony Blair, which discussed the role that the prime minister's spouse has played since the 1950s. In 2007, she helped Clarissa Eden, Winston Churchill's niece and wife of prime minister Anthony Eden, edit Clarissa Eden: A Memoir--Churchill to Eden.
Her last book was Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler. Published in 2019, it chronicled the life of the composer, author and socialite Alma Mahler, who fled Austria in 1938 with her husband, Franz Werfel, before settling in the United States, and whose earlier husbands were composer Gustav Mahler and architect Walter Gropius. While many books had been published about Mahler in German, Haste's was the first written for an English-language audience.