Abraham returns from exile
Producer still haunted by persecution in apartheid South Africa
His three decades in London have been an extraordinary switchback ride -- from the BBC and indie producer Primetime to starting his own company Portobello Films, which led him to the Oscar podium with Jan Sverak's "Kolya," through a difficult bout with Harvey Weinstein's lawyers, before finding redemption via love and marriage three years ago to the Swedish-born heiress and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing.
Since then, Abraham and Rausing have emerged as a significant couple in the U.K.'s cultural scene. They started their own publishing company Portobello Books and bought Granta, the literary magazine and book imprint. Abraham made his debut as a theater producer, and has thrown himself back into filmmaking with renewed enthusiasm.
But it's only now, after so many years of exile, that he's starting to reconnect with his South African roots. He has formed a partnership to develop film and theater projects with Cape Town-based director Mark Dornford-May, who won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2005 for "U-Carmen eKhayelitsha," his Xhosa version of the opera "Carmen," and won acclaim at Sundance this year for "Son of Man," his re-telling of the New Testament set in contempo South Africa.
"Over 30 years ago, as a Cape Town-born foreign correspondent, I helped give voices of the disenfranchised black majority an opportunity to be heard abroad. Now as a film and theater producer, I want to do the same for its extraordinary creative talent," Abraham says.
But despite the enormous political changes in South Africa since he left, returning to his homeland isn't easy. It opens what he describes as a "Pandora's Box" of painful memories and associations long suppressed.
Abraham was put under house arrest, without charge or explanation, on Nov. 29, 1976. He was a student union leader, with a sideline as a stringer for those twin pillars of the British liberal establishment, the BBC and the Manchester Guardian. His crime was to report sympathetically on the black resistance. He became so alienated from his family that his father, a navy commander, informed upon his "subversive" activities to authorities.
House arrest sounds innocuous, but in reality it was a form of intense psychological intimidation from which he still bears the scars. Trapped in his ground-floor apartment, he received death threats at night from far-right fanatics who paraded up and down outside his window during the day. Refused an exit visa, he was smuggled out of the country by contacts in the underground. It later transpired that one of these contacts, Craig Williamson, was a double agent for the secret police, with a long track record of torture and assassination.
Abraham arrived shellshocked in Britain early in 1977, got a job at the BBC, and did his best not to look back.
"I knew too many exiles whose body was in England but whose heart and mind was in South Africa, and I didn't want to be like that," he recalls.
When he started Portobello Films, he found himself drawn to voices emerging from the collapse of another repressive dictatorship, that of Soviet communism. He produced a Russian-language film based on Vladimir Voinovich's book "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin," banned in the Soviet Union for many years. "Kolya" was one of the first films from the new Czech Republic to attract international attention.
But with Sverak hesitant to make the jump into English-language movies, it proved a hard act to follow. Abraham set up Jez Butterworth's "Birthday Girl" at Miramax's ill-fated London venture HAL Films, but got bogged down in creative conflicts.
He quit the project, Weinstein sued him for fraud, and Abraham countersued, displaying that same combination of stubbornness and reckless bravery that has gotten him into trouble all his life. The case dragged on bitterly for three years, running up millions of dollars of costs before it was settled.
Meanwhile Sverak's sophomore pic "Dark Blue World" didn't get the same warm reception as "Kolya," and Abraham, exhausted and dispirited, considered quitting the business altogether.
His marriage in 2003 to Rausing, the second for both of them, changed everything. Rausing's father made his fortune from packaging innovation Tetra-Pak, and her charitable trust gives away $30 million a year to human rights causes. It took a while for Abraham to adjust to his new reality, but now he's spreading his wings again.
He ventured into the theater with "Embers," adapted by Christopher Hampton from Sandor Marai's novel and starring Jeremy Irons, with whom he made the movie "Danny Champion of the World" 20 years before. After a strong West End run, Abraham was ready to underwrite a Broadway transfer, but that dream was punctured by a negative review in the New York Times.
He has commissioned new plays from Ronald Harwood, Hugh Whitemore, Craig Warner and Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Portobello Books has a growing list of "activist" fiction and nonfiction, such as "A Human Being Died That Night," the confessions of the commander of the apartheid death squads, which Abraham is also developing as a movie. After a few years' hiatus, Portobello Films is also ramping up. Sverak has nearly finished his latest Czech film "Empties," and will finally move onto his English-language debut with the movie version of "Embers." Abraham just bought Jung Chang's non-fiction blockbuster "Wild Swans," which recounts the turbulent history of 20th century China through the story of her own family, to be made as a Chinese movie with Hampton again writing the script.
Abraham has the good fortune to fund all these high-minded adventures in books, theater and film from his own pocket. "Nothing has really changed. I've always been a gambler. I've always invested my own money," he says. But of course, these days he can afford a few more gambles, and his shirt is in no danger of being lost.
In South Africa, Dornford-May is workshopping stage productions of "The Magic Flute" and "The Threepenny Opera," both in Xhosa and both of which, like "U-Carmen" may ultimately become movies.
Abraham is also developing a film based on "Unfeeling" by white Zimbabwean novelist Ian Holding, which Ian Gabriel will direct.
But he admits that death threats still haunt him every time he goes back to South Africa. In the past couple of years, he has taken some steps to exorcise the demons of his past, digging up his old secret service files and recording a radio program for the BBC in which he confronted both Williamson and his estranged father. But from the comfort of his new life, he's unsure how much further he wants to go.
Abraham's life has taken many extraordinary twists and turns. But as he gets drawn back into South Africa, heads off to China and embarks on new adventures in theater and publishing, there may be many more to come.
