| Peter Tewksbury | |
| Birth Date: | 21 March 1923 |
| Yearsactive: | 1954–1977 |
| Occupation: | Director |
Henry Peter Tewksbury (March 21, 1923 - February 20, 2003) was an American film and television director.
Born in Cleveland, he attended Dartmouth College but left to serve as a U.S. Army captain in the Pacific during World War II.[1]
Following the war, he then worked for radio KTIP in Porterville, California where he did almost every job at the station during a five-year stint. He also founded the Porterville Barn Theater in 1947 and becoming its director, and his reputation spread to Hollywood.
When Father Knows Best moved from radio to TV in 1954, he was hired to direct where he was awarded an Emmy Award about five years into the run of the program. He also produced and directed episodes of the Jackie Cooper series The People’s Choice.
In 1960 he directed My Three Sons. He left after the first season and together with a writer of the show's episodes, James Leighton, created, produced and directed It's a Man's World, a TV series aired from September 1962 to January 1963 that attracted a loyal following, but not sponsors.[2]
He directed Sunday in New York with Jane Fonda in 1963, Walt Disney's Emil and the Detectives in 1964 and a pair of Elvis Presley movies ("Stay Away Joe" and "Trouble with Girls". Tewksbury collaborated with J.D. Salinger on a film adaptation of the author's "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which was never produced after a casting dispute between the two men.[3]
Tewksbury directed several television pilots that morphed into made for TV movies; many were directed by a My Three Sons writer, A.J. Carothers.
He moved between Vermont and California, where he managed a ranch near Cambria, California. In Vermont, he worked as a farmer, a miller of wheat and the founding teacher of an alternative school in an abandoned one-room schoolhouse before becoming a cheese expert where he authored The Cheeses of Vermont: A Gourmet Guide to Vermont's Artisanal Cheesemakers[4] and became known as "Henry the Cheeseman", a legendary figure at the Brattleboro Food Co-op.