David Lean

Sir David Lean (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor.

David Lean was born on 25 March 1908 at 38 Blenheim Crescent, South Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye).

His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading.

His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University.

In 1923, his father deserted the family and Lean would later follow a similar path after his own first marriage and child.

Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labelled a "dud" of a student; he left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at the age of 18, and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice.

A more formative event for his career than his formal education was an uncle's gift, when Lean was aged ten, of a Brownie box camera.

"You usually didn't give a boy a camera until he was 16 or 17 in those days. It was a huge compliment and I succeeded at it."

Lean printed and developed his films, and it was his "great hobby".

Bored by his work, Lean spent every evening in the cinema, and in 1927, after an aunt had advised him to find a job he enjoyed, he visited Gaumont Studios where his obvious enthusiasm earned him a month's trial without pay.

He was taken on as a teaboy, promoted to clapperboy, and soon rose to the position of third assistant director.

Originally a film editor in the early 1930s, Lean made his directorial debut with 1942's In Which We Serve, which was the first of four collaborations with Noël Coward.

By 1930 he was working as an editor on newsreels, including those of Gaumont Pictures and Movietone, while his move to feature films began with Freedom of the Seas (1934) and Escape Me Never (1935).

He edited Gabriel Pascal's film productions of two George Bernard Shaw plays, Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941).

He edited Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).

After this last film, Lean began his directing career, after editing more than two dozen features by 1942.

His first work as a director was in collaboration with Noël Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), and he later adapted several of Coward's plays into successful films.

These films are This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945) with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as quietly understated clandestine lovers, torn between their unpredictable passion and their respective orderly middle-class marriages in suburban England.

He also directed the film adaptations of two Charles Dickens novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), as well as the romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945).

The film shared Grand Prix honors at the 1946 Cannes film festival and garnered Lean his first Academy nominations for directing and screen adaptation, and Celia Johnson a nomination for Best Actress.

It has since become a classic, one of the most highly regarded British films.

Two celebrated Charles Dickens adaptations followed – Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948).

The first screening in Berlin during February 1949 offended the surviving Jewish community and led to a riot.

It caused problems too in New York, and after private screenings, was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis.

"To our surprise it was accused of being anti-Semitic", Lean wrote.

"We made Fagin an outsize and, we hoped, an amusing Jewish villain."

The next film directed by Lean was The Passionate Friends (1949), an atypical Lean film, but one which marked his first occasion to work with Claude Rains, who played the husband of a woman (Ann Todd) torn between him and an old flame (Howard).

The terms of the production code meant that the film's release in the United States was delayed until July 1951 after cuts amounting to eight minutes.

Beginning with Summertime in 1955, Lean began to make internationally co-produced films financed by the big Hollywood studios.

The critical failure of his film Ryan's Daughter led him to take a fourteen-year break from filmmaking, during which he planned a number of film projects which never came to fruition.

Widely considered one of the most important figures of British cinema, Lean directed the large-scale epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984).

David Lean was given honorary membership of the Guild of British Film Editors in 1968.

In 1984, he had a career revival with A Passage to India, adapted from E. M. Forster's novel, which was a hit with critics, but proved to be the last film Lean would direct.

Described by film critic Michael Sragow as "a director's director, whose total mastery of filmcraft commands nothing less than awe among his peers", Lean has been lauded by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott.

David Shipman wrote in The Story of Cinema: Volume Two (1984): "Of the other Dickens films, only Cukor's David Copperfield approaches the excellence of this pair, partly because his casting, too, was near perfect".

These two films were the first directed by Lean to star Alec Guinness, whom Lean considered his "good luck charm".

The actor's portrayal of Fagin was controversial at the time.

Nominated seven times for the Academy Award for Best Director, which he won twice for The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, he has seven films in the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films (with three of them being in the top five) and was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990.

As Tony Sloman wrote in 1999, "As the varied likes of David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher and Dorothy Arzner have proved, the cutting rooms are easily the finest grounding for film direction."

Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound "Directors' Top Directors" poll in 2002.