Allan Smith

Brian Desmond Hurst is Northern Ireland's greatest film director, celebrated in the Hurst Sound Stage in Belfast’s Titanic Studios. He’s also, arguably, one of the UK’s greatest war film directors. Work includes the perennial favourite Scrooge starring Alastair Sim, Theirs is the Glory, regularly rated one of the greatest war films ever made, Dangerous Moonlight (which introduced the Warsaw Concerto to the world) and Ourselves Alone (a film about The Irish War of Independence banned in Northern Ireland for many years). His on-screen debut was in 1928 alongside John Wayne in the silent era of Hollywood before moving behind the camera. His career was bookended with his adaptations of the J M Synge plays, Riders to the Sea (1935) and Playboy of the Western World (1962).