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Portrait of Richard Attenborough

Film · British & Irish

Richard Attenborough

1923–2014 · British

British epic — the long-gestated biographical picture

Richard Attenborough had two full careers: three decades as an actor, from a teenage razor-gang killer in Brighton to the dinosaur-park millionaire of his old age, and three decades as a director of large, humane, slow-built historical pictures. His twenty-year campaign to film the life of the Indian independence leader finally produced a picture that swept the 1983 Academy Awards. He was a governor of nearly every British film institution, a life peer, and the brother of a famous naturalist.

How to spot them

  • ▸The unhurried biographical epic, with thousands of extras and a moral cause at its centre
  • ▸As an actor, the baby-faced killer or the weak man cracking under pressure
  • ▸A fondness for calling colleagues 'darling'; a tireless committee man and fundraiser
  • ▸Long-gestated projects: twenty years for one film, a decade for another
  • ▸Composer John Barry and cinematographers Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor on the big pictures

Key films

A seventeen-year-old razor-gang leader on a south-coast pier makes a gramophone record his girlfriend must never play (1947)

Brighton Rock — Attenborough as Pinkie Brown, from the Graham Greene novel. An acting role.

Recruitment and slaughter on the Western Front staged as a seaside pierrot show on Brighton pier, with a scoreboard of the dead (1969)

Oh! What a Lovely War — his directorial debut.

An Allied airborne operation to seize Dutch river crossings fails at the last bridge (1977)

A Bridge Too Far — his all-star account of Operation Market Garden.

A barrister-turned-ascetic walks to the sea to make salt in defiance of an imperial monopoly (1982)

Gandhi — eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, with Ben Kingsley.

A white newspaper editor flees South Africa carrying the manuscript of his murdered black friend (1987)

Cry Freedom — Denzel Washington as Steve Biko, Kevin Kline as Donald Woods.

An Oxford don's late marriage to an American poet dying of cancer (1993)

Shadowlands — Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis, Debra Winger as Joy Davidman.

An eccentric billionaire in a white suit welcomes two palaeontologists to the island park he has built (1993)

Jurassic Park — Attenborough as John Hammond. An acting role.

Key ideas

  • Non-violence and reconciliation as screen subjects worth a three-hour running time
  • The producer's craft: raise the money yourself, over decades if necessary, to keep the film your own
  • Star-studded casts as a financing tool for otherwise unsellable historical material

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Cambridge on 29 August 1923; his younger brother was the broadcaster David Attenborough
  • •He appeared in the original London production of The Mousetrap in 1952, as Detective Sergeant Trotter
  • •Gandhi (1982) won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, after twenty years of trying to finance it
  • •He directed Chaplin (1992), with Robert Downey Jr. as the silent comedian
  • •He was knighted in 1976 and made a life peer as Baron Attenborough of Richmond upon Thames in 1993
  • •He was chairman of Channel 4, of the BFI, and of RADA, and president of BAFTA
  • •His daughter and granddaughter were killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004
  • •His last film as director was Closing the Ring (2007)
  • •He was a lifelong director of Chelsea Football Club and later its life president
  • •He died on 24 August 2014, five days before his ninety-first birthday

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources