David lean

David Lean (Croydon, London, March 25, 1908 - Limehouse, April 16, 1991) was an award-winning British film director, author of cult classic films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Ryan's Daughter (1970).

Biography

Early years and education

Lean was born at 38 Blenheim Crescent, Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), the son of Francis William le Blount Lean and Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). His parents were Quakers and he studied at Leighton Park School, founded by Quakers in Reading, Berkshire. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the Inklings Literary Club when he studied at Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was called a "failure" as a student. He dropped out of school at Christmas 1926 at the age of 18 and joined his father's accounting firm as an apprentice. A more important event in his career than his formal education was the gift of a Kodak Brownie camera from an uncle when he was ten years old. "You didn't normally give a kid a camera until he was 16 or 17 in those days. It was a great compliment and I did it & # 34;, he said about this event. Lean printed and developed his films, and it was his 'big hobby.' In 1923, his father left the family and Lean would later follow a similar path after his first marriage and son. of the.

Career

Term as editor

Bored with his job, Lean went to the movies every day, and in 1927, after being advised by an aunt to look for a job he liked, he visited Gaumont Studios, where his obvious enthusiasm landed him an unpaid job. He was hired as assignment boy and soon rose to the position of third assistant director. In the 1930s, he was working as an editor for newsreels, including all of Gaumont Pictures and Movietone, while his move to feature film began with Freedom of the Seas (1934) and Escape Me Never. (1935).

He becomes editor of Gabriel Pascal's productions on two plays by George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). He also staged the plays 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), by Powell and Pressburger. After the latter film, Lean began his directing career, having edited more than twenty features until 1942. As Tony Sloman wrote in 1999: 'As the varied likes of David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher and Dorothy Arzner have shown, 'cutting rooms are the best basis for directing a film'. David Lean was elected an Honorary Member of the British Film Editors in 1968.

British Movies

His first directing work was in collaboration with Noël Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), and he later adapted many of Coward's works into acclaimed films. These feature films were This Happy Breed (1944), A Mocking Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945), the latter with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as discreet clandestine lovers, torn between their unpredictable passion and their orderly middle-class marriages in suburban England. The film received Grand Prix honors at the 1946 Cannes International Film Festival and earned Lean her first Academy Award nominations in the directing and adapted screenplay categories, while Celia Johnson was nominated for best actress.. Since then it has become a classic and one of the most respected British films.

Subsequently, he directed two Charles Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). David Shipman wrote in The Story of Cinema: Volume Two (1984): "Of the other Dickens films, only Cukor's David Copperfield comes close to the excellence of this pair, in part because their casting was also near perfect'. These two films starred Alec Guinness, whom he considered his 'good luck charm'. The portrayal of the actor as Fagin was controversial at his time. The first screening in Berlin in February 1949 offended the surviving Jewish community and led to riots. It also caused trouble in New York, and after private screenings, the tape was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis. "To our surprise, she was accused of being an anti-Semite," Lean wrote. "We made Fagin great and, we hope, a fun Jewish villain." eight minutes.

Her next film was Passionate Friends (1949), a typical romance but in which she works for the first time with Claude Rains, who played the woman's husband (Todd) torn between himself and a old flame (Howard). Passionate Friends was the first of three jobs he did with actress Ann Todd, who became his third wife. Madeleine (1950) was her next film, in which she narrates a Cause célèbre produced in Victorian Glasgow in 1857, with Todd's character also starring. "Once again," according to critic David Thomson, "Lean complies with the pressing need for ownership, but not before the film has subjected its characters and audience to a game of mixed feelings". The last of Todd's feature films, The Sound Barrier (1952), was derived from a Terence Rattigan play and was the first of the three he would do with London Films by Alexander Korda. The Despot (1954), starring Charles Laughton, was based on Harold Brighouse's play of the same name.

International films

David Lean and Omar Sharif preparing a shot Dr. Zhivago in the pine forest of San Leonardo de Yagüe, in the province of Soria, Spain.

Summer Follies (1955) marked the international start for Lean. It was financed in part by the Americans, although again it was for Korda's London Films. The film features Katharine Hepburn in the title role of herself, as a middle-aged American woman who has an affair during her vacation in Venice. The tape was filmed entirely in said Italian city.

Films for Columbia and Sam Spiegel

Lean films now began to become less frequent but much larger in scale and more widely released internationally. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was based on the novel by Pierre Boulle, telling the story of British and American prisoners of war trying to survive in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. The film stars William Holden and Alec Guinness and became the highest-grossing film of 1957 in the United States. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, for Alec Guinness, who had struggled with Lean to deepen his role as an obsessively correct British commander determined to build the best possible bridge for his Japanese captors in Burma.

After a long season of locations in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and a few other places, Lean made Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. This was Lean's first project with a script by playwright Robert Bolt and rewritten with Michael Wilson (one of the writers blacklisted for The Bridge on the River Kwai). This film tells the true story of T. E. Lawrence, a British officer who is depicted in the film as uniting the disputed Bedouin peoples of the Arabian Peninsula to fight in World War I and then pushing for independence.

After some hesitation and conflict with the director on Bridge on the River Kwai, Alec Guinness appeared again in a fourth collaboration with David Lean. On this occasion, he appears as the Arab leader, Prince Faisal. Composer Maurice Jarre, in his first collaboration with Lean, created a film score for a highly-regarded theme that won him his first Oscar for Best Original Score. The film made actor Peter O'Toole, playing Lawrence, an international star. The film was nominated for ten Oscars and won seven, including Best Picture and Lean's second for Best Director. In this way, he remains the only British director to win the Oscar for Best Director more than once.

For MGM

Lean again achieved another box office success with Doctor Zhivago (1965), a romance set in the Russian Revolution. The film, based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak, tells the story of a brilliant and caring doctor and poet (Omar Sharif) who, while apparently happily married to a Russian aristocrat, falls in love with a beautiful young abandoned mother named Lara. (Julie Christie) and fights to be with her in the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War.

Initially, reviews for Doctor Zhivago were lukewarm, but critics have since viewed it as one of Lean's best films, with film director Paul Greengrass calling it " one of the great masterpieces of cinema". In 2015 it was the eighth highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. Producer Carlo Ponti used Maurice Jarre's lush romantic score to create a pop tune called "Lara's Theme", which became an international hit song with lyrics under the title " Somewhere My Love", one of the most successful musical themes in cinema. British cinematographer Freddie Young, for his part, won an Academy Award for his color cinematography. Around the same time, Lean also directed scenes in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), while George Stevens was engaged in location work in Nevada.

Lean's next film was Ryan's Daughter (1970), released after an extended period of filming in Ireland. A romance set against the backdrop of Ireland's 1916 struggles against the British, it is loosely based on Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The tape was carried out by the old 'bad boy' Hollywood star Robert Mitchum in an uncharacteristic role as a long-suffering Irish husband, and British actress Sarah Miles as his unfaithful young wife. The film received far less positive reviews than the director's previous work, being particularly panned by New York critics. Some critics felt that the film's massive visual scale on beautiful Irish beaches and lengthy running time did not suit its small-scale romantic narrative. Nevertheless, the film was a box office success, earning $31 million and becoming the eighth highest-grossing film of that year. He won two Oscars the following year, one for cinematographer Freddie Young and one for supporting actor John Mills for his role as the young village idiot.

The film's poor critical reception led Lean to meet with the National Society of Film Critics, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, accompanied by The New Yorker reporter Pauline Kael, and ask them why they objected to the film. "I noticed problems from the moment I sat down," Lean said of the now-famous lunch. Time magazine critic Richard Schickel asked Lean how he, the director of Brief Encounter, could have done "shit" as Ryan's daughter. These critics ripped the film for two hours in the face of David Lean, who was so devastated that he was discouraged from making films for a long time. "They just ripped the movie to pieces," Lean said in a later television interview. 'It really had such a terrible effect on me for a number of years... you start to think maybe they're right. Why the hell am I making movies if I don't have to? It terribly collapses one's self-confidence", said the director.

Last years and unfinished projects

Between 1977 and 1980, Lean and Robert Bolt worked on the adaptation of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian, Richard Hough's version of the Mutiny on the Ship. It was originally to be released as a two-part film, one called The Lawbreakers, which dealt with the trip to Tahiti and the subsequent mutiny, and the second called The Long Arm, which it focused on the voyage of the mutineers after the mutiny, as well as the Admiralty's response by sending the frigate HMS Pandora, on which some of the mutineers were imprisoned. Lean was unable to find financial backing for both films after Warner Bros. withdrew from the project, deciding to focus it on a seven-part television series before gaining an endorsement from Italian mogul Dino De Laurentiis. The project suffered a further setback when Bolt suffered a severe stroke and was unable to continue writing. The director felt that Bolt's involvement would be crucial to the success of the film. Melvyn Bragg ended up writing a considerable part of the script.

Lean was forced to leave the project after overseeing the casting and construction of the $4 million Bounty replica. At the last possible moment, actor Mel Gibson brought in his friend Roger Donaldson to direct the film, as producer De Laurentiis did not want to lose the millions he had already invested in the project. The film was eventually released under the title of Rebellion on board.

Lean then embarked on a project he had followed since the 1960s, a film adaptation of A Passage to India (1984), based on the novel of the same name by E.M. Forster in which the colonial conflicts in India occupied by the British are narrated. Entirely shot on location in the Indian subcontinent, this became her last full-length film. He turned down a draft from Santha Rama Rau, who was responsible for the stage adaptation and Forster's preferred screenwriter, and wrote the script himself. In addition, Lean also edited the film with the result that his three roles in the production (writer, editor, director) earned equal status in the credits.

Lean enlisted longtime collaborators for the cast and crew, including Maurice Jarre (who won another Oscar), Alec Guinness in his sixth and final role for Lean, as an eccentric Hindu Brahmin, and John Box, the designer of production of dr. Zhivago . Contrary to the critical response to Ryan's Daughter, the film opened to universally rave reviews and was nominated for eleven Oscars, with Lean himself nominated for three Oscars: Best Director, Best editing and the best adapted script. Her female star, in the complex role of a confused young British woman who falsely accuses an Indian man of rape, earned Australian actress Judy Davis her first Oscar nomination. Peggy Ashcroft, as the sensitive Mrs. Moore, won the Oscar for best supporting actress, making her, at 77, the oldest actress to win that award. According to renowned critic Roger Ebert, it's "one of the biggest big-screen adaptations I've ever seen" But this was, sadly, to be his last.

Lean was later hired by Warner Bros. to direct an adaptation of J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, after director Harold Becker left the project. Steven Spielberg was hired as a producer for Lean, but later took over the directing role when Lean left the project. Spielberg was drawn to the idea of making the film because of his long-standing admiration for Lean and his films.

During the last years of his life, Lean had a film version of the Joseph Conrad play Nostromo in pre-production. For this project, she assembled an all-star cast that included Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Quaid, with Georges Corraface as the title character. Lean also wanted Alec Guinness to play Doctor Monyghan, but the aging actor turned him down in a 1989 letter: 'I think it would be a disastrous casting. The only thing about the role that he could have done right is the crippled crab-shaped ride." As with Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg was attached as producer with backing from Warner Bros., but after several rewrites and script disagreements, he left the project and was replaced by Serge Silberman., a respected producer for Greenwich Film Productions.

The Nostromo project involved several writers, including Christopher Hampton and Robert Bolt, but their work was abandoned. In the end, Lean decided to write the film himself with the help of Maggie Unsworth (wife of renowned cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth), with whom he had worked on the scripts for Brief Encounter, Great Expectations , Oliver Twist and Passionate Friends. Originally, Lean considered shooting in Mexico, but later decided to shoot in London and Madrid, partly to reassure O'Toole, who had insisted that he would only participate if the film was shot close to his home. Nostromo had a total budget of $46 million and filming was six weeks away at the time of Lean's death from throat cancer and his burial in Putney Vale Cemetery. It was rumored that his friend, the film director John Boorman would take the direction, but the production collapsed. Nostromo was finally adapted for the small screen as a BBC miniseries in 1997.

Private life and honors

Lean was a resident of Limehouse, East London. Her house on Narrow Street is still in the family. His regular writer-producer Norman Spencer has said that Lean was a "big ladies' man"; and stated: & # 34; To my knowledge, she was with almost 1,000 women & # 34;. He was married six times, had a son (Peter Lean, the product of his first marriage) and at least two grandchildren, from whom he was completely estranged, and was divorced five times. He was survived by his last wife, art dealer Sandra Cooke, co-author (with Barry Chattington) of David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (2001).

His six wives were:

• Isabel Lean (28 June 1930 – 1936)
• Kay Walsh (23 November 1940 – 1949)
• Ann Todd (21 May 1949 - 1957)
• Leila Matkar (4 July 1960 – 1978) (from Hyderabad, India); its longest marriage
• Sandra Hotz (28 October 1981 – 1984)
• Sandra Cooke (15 December 1990 – until her death)

Lean was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1953, and was knighted for contributions and services to the arts in 1984. Lean received the American Film Institute Award in 1990. In 2012, Lean was considered a British cultural icon selected by artist Sir Peter Blake for appearing on the famous cover of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , where Blake placed the British artists he most admired.

In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 best British films of the 20th century, featuring seven of Lean's films:

• Brief meeting (#2)
• Lawrence of Arabia (#3)
• Great hopes (#5)
• The bridge over the Kwai River (#11)
• Dr. Zhivago (#27)
• Oliver Twist (#46)
• In Which We Serve (#92)

In addition, the American Film Institute's list of "100 Years...100 Movies" ranked Lawrence of Arabia in fifth place, Bridge on the River Kwai in thirteenth place and Doctor Zhivago in position 39. In 2007, this list was modified and Lawrence of Arabia moved to 7th position and The Bridge on the River Kwai was ranked 36th.

Lean directed more films that won Best Cinematography Oscars than any other director, with five wins out of six nominations (Great Expectations, River Above the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter - the latest nomination was for A Passage to India).

Style and influence

As Lean himself noted, his films were often admired by other directors as a showcase of the filmmaker's art. In The Rough Guide to Film, Tom Charity writes:

Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and David Lean: the three great British filmmakers of his generation were born in a radius of fifty miles and only nine years apart. Each of them served as an apprentice in the era of silence, learned his craft from the bottom up, demonstrated his temper in his thirty years and reached a creative peak in the middle age (...) Lean was first of all an excellent craftsman. In the years before the war he developed a reputation as the best editor in the country. His films are distinguished by their control of the rhythm and cunning use of the counterpoint. Lean's camera is more discreet than Hitchcock's or Powell's, and although it was famous for its perfectionist compositional sense, its eye was more conventional. It is in the court that you feel both the romantic burning and repression that create the central tension in your work.

Steven Ross wrote that Lean's films "reveal a consistently tragic vision of romantic sensibility that attempts to reach beyond the limitations and restrictions of everyday life," and that they tend to present "intimate stories of a close-knit group of characters [whose] fates are indirectly but powerfully shaped by the events that shake history around them". He further observes that, in his work, "the setting [is used] as as dramatic and thematic a presence as any character in the film". Michael Newton of The Guardian, analyzing Brief meeting and Doctor Zhivago, said: "Today, 50 years later, we can see how the scale of Doctor Zhivago forms the measure its attractiveness and its beauty seem intrinsic to one of the virtues of cinema. With Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Lean is one of the best film directors this country has produced. Like all of them, he is a romantic and romance was his theme. In addition to the blossoming and breaking of disordered desires, the lure of beauty, adventure, and unencumbered life. Both films demonstrate the impossibility of an illicit love finding a place in the world. In short, Brief Encounter is about social conventions and decency. Romance blossoms only to be worn down by the chatter of casual acquaintances. In Doctor Zhivago, it is history and politics that prove to be the enemy of love".

Lean was also known for his perfectionist approach to film; director Claude Chabrol stated that he and Lean were the only directors working at the time and that they were prepared to wait "forever" the perfect sunset, but while Chabrol measured "forever" in terms of days, Lean did it "in terms of months".

Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, in particular, are fans of Lean's epic films and claim him as one of their main influences. Spielberg and Scorsese also assisted in the 1989 restoration of Lawrence of Arabia, which had been substantially altered both by the studio in its theatrical release and particularly in its televised versions. The theatrical re-release greatly revived Lean's reputation.

Many other later directors of the 20th century who have acknowledged a significant influence of Lean include Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Spike Lee, and Sergio Leone.

John Woo named Lawrence of Arabia as one of his three favorite films. Director Joe Wright cites Lean's works, particularly Doctor Zhivago, as a major influence in his work, as did director Christopher Nolan.

However, the critical verdict was not unanimous. For example, David Thomson, writing about Lean in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, comments:

From 1952 to 1991, he made eight films and in just one of them — I mean Lawrence of Arabia — is the enough show to mask the hollow rhetoric of the scripts. But Lean before 1952 made eight films in ten years that are animated, touching and inspiring: they make you want to go out and make movies, they are so in love with the power of the screen and the combustion in the edition."

Film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times dismissed Lawrence of Arabia as "a huge, thunderous camel opera that tends to fade quite a bit. badly as it moves into the third hour and engages in surly disillusionment and political deceit". Writing about the same film in The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris commented that Lawrence of Arabia was "...just another expensive, boring, overlong and coldly impersonal mirage...I generally find it obnoxiously calculating and condescending..."

Filmography

• Blood, sweat and tears (In Which we Serve(1942)
• Life rules (This Happy Breed(1944)
• A mocking spirit (Blithe Spirit(1945)
• Brief meeting (Brief Encounter(1945)
• Great hopes (Great Expectations(1946)
• Oliver Twist (Oliver Twist(1948)
• Passionate friends (The Passionate Friends(1949)
• Madeleine (Madeleine(1950)
• The Sound Barrier (1952)
• The Despota (Hobson's Choice(1954)
• Summer Madness (Summertime(1955)
• The bridge over the Kwai River (The Bridge on the River Kwai(1957)
• Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence of Arabia(1962)
• Dr. Zhivago (Dr. Zhivago(1965)
• Ryan's daughter (Ryan's Daughter(1970)
• Passage to India (A Passage to India(1984)

Awards and nominations

Oscar Awards

Golden Globe Awards

Cannes International Film Festival

Berlin International Film Festival