Obituary

Andrew Szepessy died on 12 December 2018 aged 77, just before his 78^th birthday.

Kate and Victor Szepessy, his children, originally wrote this tribute for the Oxford College Record 2019. Republished below with updates, 2020. 

Our father, Andrew, described himself, with great humour, as the last glint in the eye of an aristocratic family, the Szepessys. Full of amusing stories and wide-ranging knowledge that he liked to share, Andrew was born in Brighton, England in 1940 into a Hungarian refugee family that had fled Eastern Europe in 1938. In war-torn London, the family was beset by tragedy and within the space of a few years, Andrew had lost his mother and grandfather as well as being separated from his father and younger sister, whom he continued to search for all his life. Amidst all this, his beloved, whimsical, Hungarian-speaking grandmother raised him to appreciate languages, learning, and good food.

A talented student, Andrew went to boarding school at Woolverstone Hall, where he excelled at Humanities, wrote poems, and acted in school plays. His school chums also remember him playing cricket and rugby “most vigorously.”

In 1959, he came up to Univ to read PPE, but switched to English and became active with the Univ Players. He had fond memories of being tutored by Christopher Tolkien and having tea with J.R.R Tolkien. At an Oxford Black tie reunion in 1995, he did some absent-minded packing, so somewhere there is a group photo of everyone in their dinner jackets with starched, white collars and Andrew in a bright pink shirt!

After graduation, pursuing his passion for film, Andrew worked for the BBC, BFI, and London Film School. In the mid-1960s, he obtained a grant to attend film school in Budapest where, with no reason given, he was imprisoned by the KGB. This experience was to feed his creativity and resulted in his first novel, Regulations Regarding the Swallowing of Bedsprings, published in Swedish by Prisma in 1982 to enthusiastic critical acclaim.

From the late 70s until mid 90s, Andrew worked in the Norwegian film industry. First for the Norwegian Film Institute writing scripts, directing, and editing films. Then he set up and was head of Film Studies at the University of Bergen. He actively contributed to the film journal, Filmavisa and co-made Amandus for NRK-TV in 1979 with his second wife. He made several feature films: Last Gleaming (1983), Havlandet (1983), The Prince of Fogo(1988), and the short film Snømann (1988), which won second prize at the Norwegian Short Film Festival.

He retired to a Hungarian farmstead on the Transylvanian border with his third wife to write. In 2003, he published Dokumentarfilm, a book on documentary film with Forlaget Vett & Viten in Norwegian.

Sorely missed, Andrew leaves two children, Kate and Victor, and two grandchildren, Sacha and Felix. He sadly did not get to enjoy the arrival of his first great-grandchild in spring 2019. Andrew fought his short but sudden illness to the end as he so wanted to live to see his novel, retitled Epitaphs for Underdogs, published in 2021 in English by Vintage, French by Payot & Rivage, and Spanish by Siruela.

Kate and Victor continued their father’s search for his sister and uncovered a past of Jewish heritage and Holocaust survivors, with a wealth of cousins in the US, Germany, and Mexico. Then in May 2020, they finally managed to find his sister, their aunt, alive and well, and also a writer.