Richard Northcott, who has died aged 77, was a serial entrepreneur in DIY, furniture, pet food, jewelery and pubs – and for a while, a Hollywood film producer whose name was attached to one of the boxes -office sensation in the 1980s, the erotic epic 9 ½ Sundays.
A restless dealmaker with a well-developed taste for the high life, Northcott was generally more interested in financial possibilities and strategic gambles than in the products and services his businesses offered. But after he sold his first winning venture, a chain of DIY superstores, for £20 million, he was “sitting on a boat” – the pool deck of a cruise ship – when “someone gave me a script for a film called 9 ½ Weeks and said ‘Why don’t you go and make a film about it?’ So I bought the script and a house in Beverly Hills and started a film company.
Eventually called Nelson Films and floated on several stock exchanges, the company also produced, among other hits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers and A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson . It was “the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” Northcott told a Telegraph interviewer, but the success of 9 ½ Weeks was “a complete mistake… We used to get 50 scripts a week and anyone who thinks they can pick a winner is deluded. It’s pure luck that works first.”
The 1986 film gained notoriety for its allegedly sadomasochistic sex scenes – involving the imaginative use of ice cubes, soft fruit and jalapeno peppers – between Kim Basinger, who plays a New York art gallery employee, and Mickey Rourke as a mysterious Wall Street broker. Initially heavily edited for US release, it fared better internationally in less cut versions and eventually grossed $100 million.
During the filming, ”Basinger was just breathtaking,” Northcott recalled, explaining, “By the time it was over, they had shot these scenes 500 times. I used to go to the set as part of my job.”
Francis Richard Northcott was born in Gosport on 24 September 1946, to Vernon Northcott, who owned a chain of paint and wallpaper stores in Scotland, and his wife Joyce, née Webb – who died when Richard was young. . Richard was educated at Blundell’s in Devon and Repton in Derbyshire before qualifying as an accountant.
When Vernon gets sick and his stores aren’t doing well, Richard steps in to help but decides to close them down, investing instead in a new concept he saw in America: the DIY superstore. Dodge City was named “for some unusual reason”, the first to open in Glasgow in 1974, with small high-street shops as its only competition. The hefty initial cost was financed entirely by bank borrowings, and despite Northcott’s lack of enthusiasm for DIY as a pastime, the business went from strength to strength.
Eventually there were more than 30 Dodge City stores in suburban locations with large parking lots – and in 1981 he sold the chain to Woolworth’s; it was rebranded as part of B&Q, which Woolworth had recently acquired from its founders.
Northcott went on to invest in Select, a London modeling agency with a high glamor quotient, and to launch Brown Bear, a group of furniture stores which he sold to jeweler Gerald Ratner, who promptly traded it. to carpet tycoon Phil (later Lord. ) Harris.
After the adventures of his six-year stay in Los Angeles – “a bit like the Wild West” – Northcott returned to buy a farming estate on the Hampshire-Sussex border and became chairman of Pet City, a pet supplies warehouse chain set up by former managers of Dodge City.
When that business was sold for £150 million to an American buyer in 1996, he collected another stash – and went on to take a stake in the business of jeweler Theo Fennell, whom he met at a golf event and helped . created an upmarket international brand with outlets from Dubai to Marbella and an eager following of celebrities and cash-rich Asian consumers.
In later years, he became a partner in several pub ventures and VQ, a 24-hour London brasserie chain.
Richard Northcott married, in 1985, Kirsten Lund, daughter of a Canadian shipping magnate – who in due course left him and then married former cricketer Mark Nicholas. He is survived by his three sons with Kirsten and the partner of his later years, Joanna Kurpiers.
Richard Northcott, born September 24, 1946, died January 7, 2024
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