Herbert Theodore Richmond was born in the Forest Gate district of East London on May 7, 1929, to Sam Richmond, who owned a modest carpet business, and Bertha (Sarna) Richmond, a homemaker. His parents had left Konin for Britain just before World War I.
His mother’s family had founded an aid society for Konin’s impoverished population. His father had Anglicized the surname from Ryczke (the first syllable is pronounced “rich”) to Richmond. (Richmond upon Thames just happened to be where Theo moved as an adult.)
Theo was educated at St. Albans School and completed two years of national service as a teacher with the Royal Air Force. He graduated with a degree in international economics from the London School of Economics, where he met Diane Souccar. They married in 1955.
When she died suddenly in 1961, he was left to raise two children: Jonathan, who became an academic (and who died two years ago), and Sarah, now an associate professor of philosophy at University College London. In addition to his daughter and Ms. Langley, whom he married in 1965, he is survived by their son, Simon, a composer and record producer, and three grandchildren.
Realizing after graduation that he was more motivated by movies than economics, Mr. Richmond joined Rank Films at Pinewood Studios as a publicist. He worked with Brigitte Bardot, Dirk Bogarde and Jack Hawkins, then freelanced as a publicist for the author Kingsley Amis and for John and Roy Boulting, the English filmmakers, who encouraged him to direct television series. He also started making documentaries and writing about history and the arts for newspapers and journals.
When he was 57, Mr. Richmond happened upon an 800-page memorial book, written mostly in Yiddish and published privately in Israel in 1968 by Jews who used to live in Konin. It documented life in Konin before and during the Nazi occupation and, in black-bordered pages, listed the names of more than 2,000 Konin residents who were killed.
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