Born in Hunslet, Leeds, Willis Hall was the only son and elder child of Walter Hall, an engineer’s fitter, and his wife, Gladys (née Gibbon). He attended local council schools as well as Cockburn High School. After graduation, Hall worked in a variety of positions including factory worker, trawler hand, and amusement park attendant. Upon reaching the age of eligibility for National service, Hall volunteered for the regular army, where he served as a signals corporal in Malaya. During idle hours there, he wrote plays for Chinese children that were later broadcast on Radio Malaya and designed sets for Singapore Little Theatre. Willis Hall’s military experiences later inspired his first play, The Disciplines of War, about British soldiers ambushed in the Malayan jungle, that premiered on the fringe of the Edinburgh International Festival in August 1957. After gaining interest from the Producer Lindsay Anderson, the play was renamed The Long and the Short and the Tall, and premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1959. That year it won the Evening Standard’s Play of the Year Award, and was later turned into a film version directed by Leslie Norman in 1961 and a BBC television series in 1979. Following his success with Anderson at the Royal Court, Hall contacted a boyhood friend, writer Keith Waterhouse, about adapting his successful novel Billy Liar (1959). Their 1960 play of the same name starred Albert Finney when it premiered in 1960, and played for 582 performances before being taken out on a series of national tours. Following this success, in 1963 Hall’s and Waterhouse’s self-styled company, “Waterhall Productions”, adapted the story for the big screen, where it was filmed by John Schlesinger, with Tom Courtenay in the lead role. Under Waterhall’s coaxing, the piece also became the long-running Drury Lane musical, Billy (1974), starring Michael Crawford, and a television sit-com both in Britain (1973–4) and in the United States (1979).

Willis Hall continued this successful partnership with Waterhouse and, over the next thirty years, the two men produced more than 250 scripts for theatre, film, and television. Hall also wrote more than a dozen children’s books, including a series about a family called the Hollins who meet a vegetarian vampire called Count Alucard. He also wrote a book, Henry Hollins and the Dinosaur. His membership of The Magic Circle was a source of inspiration for these books. He also wrote 40 radio and television plays, as well as contributing to many TV series, including The Return of the Antelope and Minder. He wrote a musical about the scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, and others based on the books Treasure Island and The Wind in the Willows. He also wrote the script for the successful project, Peter Pan: A Musical Adventure (1996). Willis Hall was married four times. His first three marriages to Kathleen May Cortens (m. 1954), actress Jill Bennett (m. 1962), and Dorothy Kingsmill-Lunn (m. 1966), all ended in divorce. On 2 November 1973, Hall married the 28-year-old dancer and actress Valerie Shute, who survived him, along with his four sons. Following a long fight with esophageal cancer, Hall died at his home in Ghyll Mews, Ilkley in West Yorkshire on 7 March 2005.