Esther Ronay, documentary-maker who fought for women both in her films and behind the camera

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Esther Ronay, who has died aged 85, was a documentary film-maker who was fearless in challenging the norms of the time; she was also a sometimes formidable character who bucked against the male-dominated world of film.
A woman of intense passions, she objected to being 'treated like a housewife' as a film editor: 'I was expected to keep [the men at work] company at lunch and dinner if they were working late and they were alone,' she recalled.
She was the daughter of the Hungarian gourmet – and later Daily and Sunday Telegraph columnist – Egon Ronay, who was on the brink of being deported to the Nazi death camps when the Soviet army began the liberation of his native Budapest in December 1944.
The elder of two daughters, Esther Annamária Ronay was born in Budapest on August 24 1940. Her mother's family, the Rudolfs, were of the Hungarian landed gentry, forced by diminished circumstances to enter the civil service and the judiciary. They objected strongly to their daughter Edit marrying the Jewish Egon Ronay; they boycotted the wedding and refused to speak to the couple until the birth of Esther broke the impasse.
The Ronays, who belonged to the elite assimilated Magyar-Jewish merchant class, owned some of the best restaurants in Budapest; Egon Ronay claimed that his father was 'Budapest's fifth-highest taxpayer'.
After the war, however, the communists seized the family business, and in 1946 Egon fled to London, where Esther soon joined him along with her mother and baby sister Edina. Her grandfather would spend two years in a Hungarian labour camp as part of a communist crackdown on 'bourgeois enemies of the state'.
Egon Ronay went on to wage war on mediocre British food, launching Ronay's Guides to eateries. But although Esther Ronay was immensely proud of her father's resurrection of his fortunes, she resented being introduced as 'the daughter of Egon Ronay'. 'My father is a redoubtable Thatcherite,' she would say. 'I'm a diehard socialist.'
Her political convictions never tempted her to abandon the crisp clarity of her upper-class English accent; to do so, she felt, would have made her a phoney. It did not bother her in the least to be nicknamed 'the Duchess' at meetings of the Womens' Rights Movement in the East End of London, or on trips to Belfast when, though not a supporter of the IRA, she visited women prisoners on hunger strike.
Esther Ronay possessed what she called her father's gift for 'leaving the wrong place at the right time', and in 1969 she had something of a narrow escape in Los Angeles. She had been invited to Roman Polanski's house by his friend, the Polish scriptwriter Wojciech Frykowski, but left the gathering, bored by the excessive use of hard drugs by some of her fellow house guests, which 'rendered them like zombies and made them very poor company'.
A few days later Frykowski, along with Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate and three others, was murdered by members of the Manson Family.
Esther Ronay devoted much of her energy to intellectual pursuits. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s she was sought-after as a documentary editor at the BBC, where she proved a tough taskmaster who would not suffer artistic tantrums from directors or producers, no matter how well-established.
With the London Women's Film Group she made the animation Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1978), which dissected Grimms' fairy tales from a feminist viewpoint.
Among the documentaries she worked on were Women of the Rhondda (1972), about the wives of the striking coal miners in the Rhondda Valley in the 1920s and 1930s, and Fifties Features (1986), about how women were depicted on screen in the 1950s, and the effect this had off-screen.
After the collapse of communism in 1989 she left London for her native Budapest. In 1991 she made an award-winning documentary for the Arts Council, Beyond the Forest: Hungarian Music in Transylvania, about the nearly lost art of Hungarian Roma music, which had been suppressed by the Ceaușescu regime in Romania but brought back illegally to Hungary through traditional dance-houses.
Esther Ronay was a modest woman who seldom mentioned her glamorous and exciting past. She rarely spoke about the year she spent in Italy as personal assistant to the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, nor of her friendship with CLR James, the Trinidadian historian who was a friend of Trotsky and who wrote the brilliant cricket memoir Beyond a Boundary (1963). Esther Ronay was often pressed by friends to write her own memoir, but in vain.
She never married, although she had no shortage of proposals. She blamed Malcolm Muggeridge for the break-up of her two-year relationship with the film director Kevin Billington. Invited to her flat for dinner, Muggeridge had found her opinions, especially on religion and politics, too forthright.
Billington, who was influenced by Muggeridge's formidable intellect and easily swayed by his prejudices, later married the novelist Rachel Pakenham, daughter of the Earl of Longford, instead. Thereafter, Esther always referred to Muggeridge as 'that zealot and convert', adding: 'And to think that his father was a socialist.'
Esther Ronay had a severe fall at the Transylvania Book Festival in 2018. She was nearly 80 at the time but dismissed all offers of medical help with the riposte: 'There's a very good-looking veterinary surgeon attending the festival – he can have a look at me.'
Esther Ronay is survived by her younger sister, the fashion designer and actress Edina Ronay.
Esther Ronay, born August 24 1940, died February 16 2025
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.