Tom Erhardt, who has died aged 91, was in his heyday perhaps the most knowledgable theatre agent in the world.
He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the eldest of three sons, to Joseph and Cecilia Erhardt, and completed his education at Aquinas College in the city. He spent the immediate postwar period in the far east, serving in the US army. His love of the theatre brought him to London in 1966 to work for the impresario Peter Bridge; five years later he arrived to run the foreign rights department in the agency ruled over and named after Margaret (“Peggy”) Ramsay.
It would be difficult to imagine a more contrasting (and therefore necessary) complement to Peggy. Sweet-natured and equable, where Peggy was volatile and impulsive, Tom rapidly set about learning everything there was to know that might be in any way beneficial to writers, going to the theatre virtually every night and taking his holidays in foreign cities with the aim of assessing the quality of competing theatres there.
In a remarkably short space of time he had so mastered his brief that if you needed someone to tell you which of two rival offers to favour, whether a director was a helpful collaborator or an egotistical drunk, or even which was the best theatre in Bratislava to trust with your Slovakian rights, Tom was always your man, to be implicitly relied on.
When Peggy died in 1991 and the vultures began to circle, Alan Ayckbourn, David Hare and I met to discuss how best to move on; what was needed, we reasoned, was an agency that specialised in film and TV and that was interested in expanding a theatre division and could benefit from Tom’s unparalleled expertise and contact list. Jenne Casarotto met these criteria perfectly; and so, for the next 21 years, until his retirement in 2013, Tom went to run the theatre department of the renamed Casarotto Ramsay.
Tom was unwaveringly loyal, limitlessly conscientious – his work on the Tennessee Williams estate alone would have been a full-time job for most of us – and invariably kind. He never had a bad word to say about anyone – except for those who might be engaged in bullying, exploiting or cheating his authors.
He was an example to (and much loved by) all his colleagues at the agency; his perpetual air of slight surprise at the iniquities of the world was endearing: it came not from naivety, but perhaps from his difficulty in understanding why so few of us are capable of being as decent as he was.
He is survived by his brother, Lawrence, his nephew, Andrew, and two great-nephews, Sebastian and Gabriel.
