Cyril Frankel (1921-2017) played a pivotal role in Lucie Rie’s life following her arrival in London. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a director and filmmaker – and worked on pictures such as Permission to Kill (1975) with Ava Gardener and Dirk Bogarde and Devil on Horseback (1954). He began collecting works by Rie in the 1950s, and built up a close friendship with the artist, often loaning works from his personal collection for retrospective exhibitions. In 1982 Frankel produced a film on Rie for the BBC, presented by Sir David Attenborough. He wrote extensively on both Rie and Coper – including Modern Pots: Hans Coper, Lucie Rie & their Contemporaries, The Lisa Sainsbury Collection – and promoted their work, and that of their contemporaries through dedicated sales at Sotheby’s and later Bonhams and Phillips. In 1994 he co-curated an exhibition of Rie and Coper at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which was to be their first major museum showing in North America.