Midge MacKenzie, who has died aged 66, was a film-maker, film historian, director and writer; a woman determined to be seen and heard all her life. She dedicated her career to making uncompromising films about feminism, human rights and many other subjects, carrying her hand- held camera around as others might a handbag.
Vivid and striking in appearance, she was rarely seen without her trademark Stetson, cowboy boots, skin-tight jeans and flamboyant jewellery, her red hair worn in a dishevelled bob. Nothing if not tenacious when it came to getting what she wanted, it took her 17 years to persuade John Huston to be interviewed in l985 for her documentary series War Stories, shown on Channel 4 in l999. When afterwards she observed that "he was a tough old bugger . . . but enchanting", a friend commented that she could have been describing herself.
A lifelong feminist from the days when she filmed a Boston's women collective with Betty Friedan and Kate Millett for Women Talking, the injustices done to women in patriarchal societies was a recurring theme in her films, whether in the documentary she made for Amnesty about abuses against women or the hugely successful l975 BBC2 drama documentary Shoulder to Shoulder. She devised, developed and co-produced this story of the suffragettes' militant campaign, also writing the impressive book that accompanied the series.
Born in London in March 1938, Midge (Margaret) was the eldest of three children of Thomas MacKenzie, a sheet-metal worker in the aircraft industry, and his wife, Margaret Fanning, a company secretary. Margaret Fanning was the granddaughter of Gerard Fanning, a sergeant in the Dublin Metropolitan Police whose family later emigrated to Manchester, and Midge's sense of her Irish identity was to remain with her all her life.
During the war she was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Dublin, but later returned to Kingsbury. She left school at l6, and a typing job took her to Shaw Films in Soho, where she persuaded her employer to teach her line production.
Later in New York she worked in advertising and started making her own experimental films. Her big break was being asked in l967 to make the ground-breaking multi-media production Astarte for Joffrey Ballet, which made the cover of Time magazine.
There was a short-lived marriage in the early l960s to Peter Henry, an antiques dealer, and other relationships included "a week of non-verbal communication" with François Truffaut. But her big love was the Canadian film director Frank Cvitanovich (who died in l995) with whom she lived for nearly 10 years.
Their son, Luke (Bunny), was born prematurely, brain-damaged and autistic, but in America they discovered the Doman Delacato "patterning" method and the punishing regime of Bunny's care dominated their lives in the l970s, becoming the subject of their disturbing film, Bunny. Her relationship with Cvitanovich broke up in l977; a year later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and Bunny died in her arms at the age of 11.
MacKenzie's courage, determination and a wide circle of loving and supportive friends helped her through those difficult times, and she became a visiting fellow in Harvard, where she taught film.
Back in the UK she later worked as media policy adviser to her close friend, Carole Tongue MEP, in the l989 election and helped draft the Public Service Broadcasting Report.
She started exploring the meaning of her own childhood through reading the work of the psychoanalyst Alice Miller, and from this came Prisoners of Childhood (l991) in which actors brought out themes of pain and damage from early years. Another film called I Stand Here Ironing was based on Tillie Olsen's stories, and Saving Faces documented patients whose faces had been surgically reconstructed.
In later years a trilogy of film looking at remote communities, including Scotland, Wales and Carna in Connemara, brought her back to Ireland, where at one point she considered settling down, according to the actress Jeananne Crowley, a close friend. "She had an instinctive aristocratic air," recalls Crowley, "and she always had a gra for Ireland. It was where she felt her soul was."
Though she died from heart problems, it was ironic that cancer took the voice of someone so articulate and with so much to say. Until the end she was communicating hectically on pads of paper, and the redoubtable fighting spirit, sociability and wide roguish smile never went. This brave, witty, wild, red-haired woman was, like Huston, someone who never knew how to compromise or quit.
She leaves a brother, Michael McKenzie, whose daughter, Heidi, chose the poem Lament, from Danta Ban, a book of Irish women poets, as a final tribute to her aunt at her funeral this week.
Margaret (Midge) Rose Mackenzie: born March 6th, 1938; died January 28th, 2004