Anthony Frank “Tony” Hinds was born on the 19th of September 1922
in Ruislip, north-west London, the second of four children of William and Theresa Hinds.
He was an English film producer and screenwriter.
Tony was the son of Hammer Film Productions founder, William Hinds.
He was educated at St Paul's School, an all-boys private day school in Hammersmith, London.
He briefly joined his father's business before his war service as a pilot in the RAF during World War II.
In 1946 Hinds returned to Hammer and produced a string of modest budget thrillers.
Hinds was enthralled in the summer of 1953 by the BBC's “The Quatermass Experiment”, a six-part science fiction thriller written by Nigel Kneale.
Hinds was so impressed by what he saw he suggested Hammer buy the film rights.
They approached the BBC and snapped up the rights and “The Quatermass Xperiment” (1955) was a box-office success and became the first of the film projects that led to Hammer’s X Certificated Genre films that built Hammer’s brand and reputation and made Hammer legendary in the history of cinema.
It was Tony Hinds who came up with the idea of hiring country houses and shooting films in the rooms and grounds of the properties, which saved the cost of hiring a full studio. Which led to Hammer purchasing the mansion that they converted into the iconic Bray Studios.
Peter Cushing & Anthony Hinds
In 1956, Tony married Jean Knowles and that same year he asked an unknown writer named Jimmy Sangster to adapt a well-known gothic novel for a new, younger audience by spicing it up with sex and stage blood. The result was “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957) and it was a worldwide box-office hit with it came the blueprint of what became known as "Hammer Horror.”
After the success of “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), Tony Produced 16 films for Hammer which included 11 Horror films between 1957 and 1964.
In ‘64 Tony was lauded by the film industry as “The most successful film producer in Britain”
But a mere six years later, his nearly 25 years of success came to a premature end when he decided to retire.
Despite his achievements for Hammer, Tony was not well suited to the role that he found himself in, he was a very reserved and fastidious man by nature, and he had no desire to do the wheeling and dealing necessary to be a producer in the film business.
Content run-ins with directors, the technicians' union or even his own business partners were very much not to his taste. When he found himself at loggerheads with a fellow producer while working on the Hammer TV series “Journey to the Unknown”(1969), he decided that enough was enough. He resigned from the Hammer board and retired from the industry.
Tony wrote under the pseudonym “John Elder” and he was quite prolific Hinds continued to write scripts on a freelance basis but after his retirement, he pursued gentler pursuits: travel, sailing, photography and he enjoyed writing for amateur dramatic societies which he found rewarding.
Hammer was not the same without him, the studio struggled for 10 years before it went into liquidation in 1979.
Tony Hinds passed away on the 30th of September 2013 he was 90 years old.
