Susie Figgis, who has died of cancer aged 77, was one of Britain’s most respected screen casting directors who set young actors such as Greta Scacchi, Cathy Tyson, Jodhi May and Emily Woof on the road to stardom.
Her inspired suggestions to film directors also included putting Ben Kingsley in the role of Gandhi (1982), helping to bring Richard Attenborough’s dream project to life, and having Terence Stamp as the devil driving a cream Rolls-Royce in The Company of Wolves (1984), Angela Carter’s fantasy horror story directed by Neil Jordan.
But her greatest achievement came when she and the casting team saw tens of thousands of children while searching for the three young leads in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). She visited schools across Britain and Ireland.
Daniel Radcliffe, who was eventually cast as Harry, had already been spotted by David Heyman, the producer bringing JK Rowling’s boy wizard to the screen for the US film giant Warner Bros. He saw Radcliffe as a 10-year-old in the BBC’s 1999 adaptation of David Copperfield, playing the hero of Charles Dickens’s novel as a child.
However, Figgis, who recalled saying: “God, he’d be good!”, then had to tell the director, Chris Columbus, that Radcliffe’s father, a literary agent, and mother, a casting agent, objected if it meant moving to Los Angeles.
She herself was always aware of the potential pitfalls in catapulting children to fame. “You can mess up their lives if you’re not careful,” she said. “Kids who are good in one particular part often don’t go on to be adult actors.”
Figgis and her associates started the search for another candidate to play Harry Potter, as well as Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger and their school friends, with the firm brief to see only nine- to 11-year-olds. The stipulation for casting adults was that they must be British or Irish, and Warner finally settled on filming in Britain.
Rupert Grint started his long round of auditions as Ron by sending in a homemade videotape in which he performed a rap, while Emma Watson auditioned alongside others at her school in Oxford to play Hermione. Both had appeared only in school plays, with no professional experience.
When Warner was still not happy with the potential candidates for the lead role – after more than 40,000 boys had been considered – Figgis walked out on the production. But her belief in Radcliffe proved to be justified when Columbus and Warner went back to the idea of casting him in the part, which he took in all eight films. It also launched Radcliffe, Grint and Watson on careers that continued into adulthood.
Figgis was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Shirley (nee King), an antiques restorer, and Brian Figgis, a lawyer who had his own practice there and was the son of an Irish-born former KC. Susie’s cousin, Mike Figgis, became a director of films such as Leaving Las Vegas.
When Susie was 10, in the dying days of British colonial rule, the family moved to Britain and she boarded at Wispers school, West Sussex, where her anti-establishment attitude led to many clashes with the headteacher. She always felt an outsider, later saying: “I was never part of the hip London trendy scene. I saw things differently.”
Her career began as an actor touring in a London-based experimental theatre group, the People Show, alongside her cousin Mike, before she had the chance to work as the casting director Miriam Brickman’s assistant on the film The Assignment (1977), starring Christopher Plummer.
Figgis then struck out on her own as a casting director, for television with the gritty drama Bloody Kids and cinema with The Wildcats of St Trinian’s and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (all 1980).
Her break came with Gandhi. Persuading Attenborough to dispense with ideas of casting a white actor in the title role, she eventually suggested Kingsley, who won an Oscar for his performance.
In more than 100 films that followed, Figgis was equally adept at spotting new talent. Scacchi as the British colonial official’s wife causing scandal in India in Heat and Dust (1983), Tyson as an upmarket sex worker in Mona Lisa (1986) and Woof as Robert Carlyle’s ex-wife in The Full Monty (1997) are just a few examples.
Visiting schools frequently paid dividends, such as when she discovered Lena Headey for the role of the younger Mary in Waterland (1992). She also brought international fame to Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
Among directors who kept returning to Figgis was Jordan, more than a dozen times (mostly with the producer Stephen Woolley). The association began with The Company of Wolves, which starred Sarah Patterson, barely into her teens, as Rosaleen and Angela Lansbury as Granny, and included The Crying Game (1992) and Michael Collins (1996).
Another frequent collaborator was the director Tim Burton on films such as Sleepy Hollow (1991), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), which featured a 12-year-old Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and the live-action remake Dumbo (2019), with Nico Parker, also 12.
Figgis found another 12-year-old, Jodhi May, at a school in Camden, London, to play the ostracised daughter of a South African anti-apartheid activist in A World Apart (1988), having visited the country to cast Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom (1987).
In between the two, she had begun her passionate, secret support for the anti-apartheid cause. Recruited by the exiled Eleanor Kasrils in London to an underground network, she relayed secret communications, transferred funds and provided a safe house for ANC supporters passing through. One of those, Bill Anderson, who arrived in 1988, became her husband two years later.
He, their daughter, Anu, and her stepdaughter, Ntsiki, survive her.