Robert Fuest - Telegraph His first venture as a director was a low-budget production called Just Like a Woman (1967), about a television producer's wife (Wendy Craig) who separates from her husband and commissions a mad Bauhaus architect (Dad's Army's Corporal Jones, Clive Dunn) to design her a metal wigwam in the middle of a field. The film won some good notices, but failed to lead to further offers, so Fuest returned to The Avengers, this time as a director. When two producers of the series, Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell, wanted to move into films, they chose Fuest to direct And Soon the Darkness (1970), a thriller about two English girls on a cycling holiday in France. In the same year Fuest filmed an adaptation of Wuthering Heights , with Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy and Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff. After the two Dr Phibes pictures, Fuest directed the comedy thriller The Final Programme (1973), starring Jon Finch as the son of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who has designed a perfect, self-replicating human being. This was followed by The Devil's Rain (1975), starring Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner and featuring a young John Travolta, about a group of satanists whose powers include the ability to melt their enemies. It was shot in Mexico in only 29 days . He then returned to television for The New Avengers (1976), The Doombolt Chase (1978) and, in 1980, the creepy Revenge of the Stepford Wives, a film made for television. Fuest's final offering on the big screen was Aphrodite (1982), a French-language film in which people enjoy plenty of sex on a Greek island. He continued to work in television until the late Eighties, then became a lecturer at the London International Film School. Throughout his life Fuest enjoyed oil painting, specialising in landscapes and seascapes, often of a fantastical nature. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1951. With his first wife, Gillian, he had three sons. He married secondly, in 1981, Jane Gould, with whom he had a daughter. Robert Fuest, born September 30 1927, died March 21 2012