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Sir David Lean, KBE (March 25, 1908 – April 16, 1991) was an English film director and producer, best remembered for big-screen epics such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago . He was voted 9th best director of all time in the BFI "Directors Top Directors" poll 2002. In the 1990's a cinema was built in Croydon, Greater London to honour the great director. The David Lean cinema can be found situated within the Croydon Clocktower on Katherine street.
Early life He was born in Croydon, Greater London to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye. His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. Editing Lean started at the bottom, as a clapperboard assistant. By 1930 he was working as an editor on newsreels, including Gaumont Pictures and Movietone. His career in feature films began with Escape Me Never in 1935. He went on to edit Gabriel Pascal's film productions of two George Bernard Shaw plays, Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941), and Powell & Pressburger's Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942). Directing His first work as a director was in partnership with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), and he went on to adapt several of Coward's plays into successful films. These included This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945). These were followed by two celebrated Charles Dickens adaptations - Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), as well as The Sound Barrier (1952) a collaboration with the playwright Terence Rattigan, and what many consider the definitive version of Hobson's Choice (1954), based on the play by Harold Brighouse. Summertime (1955), marked a new direction in for Lean. Filmed in colour, it was shot entirely on location in Venice. U.S.-financed, the film starred Katharine Hepburn as a middle-aged American woman who has a romance while on holiday in Venice. In the following years, Lean went on to make the blockbusters for which he is best known: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Academy Award, followed by another for Lawrence of Arabia, (1962). Doctor Zhivago (1965) was another major hit, but after the moderately successful Ryan's Daughter in 1970, he did not direct another film until A Passage to India (1984), which would be his last. He was knighted in 1984. He was in the midst of planning an epic production of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo when he died from cancer, aged 83. Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Quaid were among the ensemble cast set to star in the film. Nostromo would eventually be made as a BBC mini-series. Marriage Lean was married six times, and divorced five — his last wife survived him: Trivia Filmography Quotation "I wouldn't take the advice of a lot of so-called critics on how to shoot a close-up of a teapot." | |||||||||||||||||||
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