Pierre Granier-Deferre, film director, was born on July 22, 1927. He died on November 16, 2007, aged 80

Pierre Granier-Deferre was a film director of real substance and considerable commercial success in his native France. A few years older than most of his Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) contemporaries, he made films straight out of the classic cinéma de papa tradition that they eschewed. He served his apprenticeship in a world still inhabited by figures such as Jean Gabin and Arletty. In 30 years as a director, Granier-Deferre made nearly 30 films. They rarely caused much of a stir, but they rarely flopped.

Born in Paris in 1927, he studied cinema and then worked as assistant to solid professionals such as André Berthomieu, Jean-Paul Le Chanois and Marcel Carné, then directed his first film, Le Petit Garçon de l’Ascenseur (The Little Boy from the Lift) in 1962. Based on a novel by Paul Vialar, the film was also the first of many literary adaptations. Other literary notables who got the Granier-Deferre treatment included Georges Duhamel, Félicien Marceau and Drieu La Rochelle. But his most obvious affinity was with Georges Simenon. His Maigret films began with Le Chat (The Cat) in 1971, starring Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret, in a kind of minimal, claustrophobic domestic world depicting the mutual hatred of an ageing couple.

Granier-Deferre was at his best in these confined settings and unhealthy relationships where everything depends on atmosphere, tension and understated intent. This was the case too in La Veuve Couderc (The Widow Couderc), made the same year with Signoret again but this time accompanied by Alain Delon, as her young lover, in 1930s France. The next pairing in oppressive circumstances, now during the war years, was formed by Romy Schneider, playing a Jew, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, a man separated from his family, in Le Train (The Last Train, 1973). In L’Étoile du Nord (The Northern Star), set in 1930s Belgium, Signoret was back as a landlady fascinated by the exotic anecdotes of a disillusioned and criminal Philippe Noiret.

Full recognition came when Une étrange affaire (A Strange Affair) won France’s top film award, the Prix Louis Delluc, plus a César for the best director, in 1981. His last hit was the rather risqué Cours privé (Private Lesson, 1986), with Elisabeth Bourgine, about a sexual scandal involving a young schoolteacher, with suggestions of lesbianism and lots of nudity. Throughout the 1990s, and even last year, however, he continued to write and adapt stories (mainly Simenon) for television, directing Bruno Cremer in three episodes in a well-received series of Maigret adventures.

Fernando Fernán-Gómez, actor, director and writer, was born on August 28, 1921. He died on November 21, 2007, aged 86

Fernando Fernán-Gómez was an actor and director of screen and stage, writer and academic who cultivated a bad-tempered persona to hide his timidity. In his 60-year career he appeared in more than 200 films, directed another 20 and wrote plays, novels and poetry, winning many prizes including seven Goyas, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars.

He was born in Lima while his mother, the actress Carola Fernández Gómez, was touring South America. His birth was registered in Buenos Aires and although he returned to Madrid at 3 he retained his Argentine passport until 1970 when he became a Spanish citizen. He caught the theatrical bug as a child and worked his way through amateur groups as well as taking acting classes provided by the anarchist CNT trade union. In 1940 he made his professional debut in the Comedy Theatre, Madrid, in We Thieves are Honourable People. He found the cinema more congenial, away from the intimacy of the theatre public, and appeared in a string of light comedy films during the 1940s before directing his first film in 1952, The Madhouse, which flopped. In 1958 he scored a notable success with Life Goes On.

After the death of Franco and the end of the military dictatorship he began to attract serious critical interest, first with his play Bicycles are for Summer, about the civil war, which was made into a film in 1983. His first novel was The Orange Seller (1961), while in the 1980s he wrote a novel from a radio series he devised, The Journey to Nowhere. In 1986 he turned it into a film. He also published two volumes of autobiography, The Yellow Time (1990) and Puerta del Sol (1995).

During the Franco era he courted controversy by directing, in 1964, Strange Journey, which was censored, and starring in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973. In 1992 he appeared in Belle Époque, which won an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film. He also took a cameo role in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. In 1995 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias award, and in 1998 he was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy, the guardian of the Castilian language.

John Simpson, glider enthusiast and academic, was born on February 13 1915. He died on September 27 2007, aged 92

As an accomplished glider pilot, Dr John Simpson gained a bird’s-eye understanding of sea breezes, local winds and complex weather systems. He wrote several meteorological books while his Gravity Currents is now a standard text in universities worldwide.

John Egerton Simpson was born in 1915 in Forest Hill, London. He studied mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and became a founding member of the Cambridge University Gliding Club.

Gliding was to become his main passion for three decades. A frequent visitor to clubs across the UK, he made some of the pioneering wave flights at the Long Mynd in Shropshire. He documented impressive cross-country flights in the 1930s and held the world distance record for a short period. While a teacher at Clayesmore School in Dorset he would co-opt a crew at weekends to help him to launch his glider from the nearby Purbeck Hills. War brought challenges to his pacifist views but in 1944 he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and served in western China.

After the war Simpson became chief instructor at Cambridge and taught at Friends School, Great Ayton, In 1947 he moved to Leighton Park School in Reading and introduced gliding to it, building a two-seater glider with his pupils, and studying sea breeze fronts, winds that provide lift for glider pilots.

Illness, however, prompted him to stop solo flying in 1962. He then joined the Department of Geophysics at the University of Reading. In 1976 he became a research associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, gaining his PhD in 1981.

Simpson wrote Sea Breeze and Local Wind, which explains how winds affect our lives in multiple ways.

One of his other interests was wildlife, and he enjoyed the distinction of having a spider named after him.