Somehow or other, he met Francis Coppola, and by the end of the year, Michael was Director Emeritus for the Zoetrope company, living as best he could without a car in Los Angeles, trying to make sense of Wim Wenders' Hammett and exerting a general influence on the very theatrical One From the Heart.At any event, in the late summer of 1981, I left Dartmouth Lucy and I moved to San Francisco. Michael went down to New York, met Thelma, and they fell for each other. Four years later, after Frankie's death, Michael and Thelma were married.Our term ended at Dartmouth: it was only 10 weeks But Michael never quite went back to England as a resident He lingered and made attachments. A few years earlier, his greatest admirer, Martin Scorsese, had found Michael in England. They had become friends, and Marty that winter was editing Raging Bull in New York. As Michael telephoned the cutting room, late at night, he began to get into conversations with Thelma Schoonmaker, Marty's editor, a mere 40 years Michael's junior Something developed.

But to see them together was like seeing Prospero and Miranda decades after The Tempest.And Michael telephoned New York. Michael was 10 years younger than Gish, and she was extra virgin still in the way that olive oil claims to be. She came up that term, to be honoured, and we all went down to the banks of the frozen White River where she and DW Griffith had shot the ice-floe sequence for Way Down East in 1919. He took malt whisky with him, and turned a few hearts, I believe He met Lillian Gish. "I'll write it as I remember it." That's how the book is so emotional, and why he nearly got sued.There were also rumours that Michael had a busy social life in Hanover He was invited out a lot. We played a lot of his films that term, and he loved talking to the audience He also began to write his autobiography, A Life in Movies.

I saw the first pages in that terrific penmanship, and I offered Michael my library if he wanted to check facts "No, I don't think so," he said. He had wanted her, he told me, for the mother in Peeping Tom, the role Maxine Audley had played. He had wanted Brown's red hair.Michael was not restful or retired in New Hampshire. And she had been his Celtic spirit in I Know Where I'm Going. She died in September 1975, and was buried in the churchyard next to Michael's cottage in Gloucestershire They had been .. lovers, I suppose, though familiars seems closer to it.

At the time, I had no notion that he had nursed and been with Pamela Brown in recent years. Years later, I discovered that she was actually the second wife, not the first "Shouldn't think so," Michael had answered dreamily And that was that He could close the door when he wanted to. He cooked meals for them, too, and he might flirt - there was a talented red-headed woman in the class, and I had alerted her that Michael was famously crazy for red hair.When I'd invited him, I'd wondered cautiously whether his wife would come with him I knew there was a wife somewhere - Frankie. He assumed his students were there to be his slaves: how else were films ever made? Didn't they want to learn the real thing? They did, and soon enough they respected his arrogant brilliance, the speed with which he saw things, the daring with which his imagination trounced drab reality. Even at 74, and a distinguished visitor, Michael could be stingingly sarcastic and aloof. Their own films looked like New Wave pictures, and here was Michael creating a world of colour, light, decor and Gothic romance, and all in a studio.But no one doubted him - or did so more than once. He co-opted the Drama department's skilled scene designer, Bernie Vyzga, and in a matter of weeks they fashioned something in the style of The Thief of Baghdad.

It wasn't what the students expected: they were raised on 1970s movies, on Altman, Godard, Scorsese, Rivette and so on. Michael came that winter term of 1980 and led a group of our best students through the task of scripting, designing and shooting a fragment of film based on events in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy. Michael had the rights on that book and he was hoping this piece of film would set up a professional production.He found a schoolgirl dancer in the town to play the lead - I wonder if she ever recovered. Michael was never polite to old age.I can still see his Cox's-orange-pippin cheeks against the snow, along with a pink tie and tweed suits that employed colours more regularly found in Matisse's Nice period. "Oh, the winter," Michael wrote back - it was the first sign that, even at the age of 74, he preferred extremes, risk and nature at its most savage. I described the options: the spring which went from snow to mud to glorious early summer, and the winter when the snows could be so deep you couldn't get out of your house. That had happened to my wife, Lucy, and me the winter before.