David Lean

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David Lean
Born March 25, 1908
Croydon, Greater London, England
Died 16 April 1991
London, England

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 1990s 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.

Contents

[edit] 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.

[edit] Film career

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] Reputation

Lean's critical reputation has shifted over the years. While his early British films have generally had near-universal acclaim, his epics have been the cause of much controversy and discussion.

Some critics, including Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, disliked Lean's epics as a whole, arguing that they were simply visual spectacles with no depth - a view which many of Lean's stringent critics still hold to this day. Director Francois Truffaut once referred to Lean's films dismissively as "Oscar packages." In his review of Doctor Zhivago, Richard Schickel argued that the film, while flawed in many aspects, was a great film if regarded in a purely visual sense - an argument which plays into the hands of Lean's detractors; but many other critics were also praiseworthy of the scripts of Lean's epics (by Carl Foreman, Michael Wilson, and Robert Bolt), which were considered to be more intelligent, literate, and believable than most epic film scripts.

As Lean himself pointed out (see Kevin Brownlow: David Lean, p. 483), however, Lean's films were (and are) perhaps appreciated most by fellow directors as a showcase of the film maker's art. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese in particular were huge fans of Lean's epic films, and claimed him as one of their primary influences. (Both also helped in the 1989 restoration of Lawrence which, when released, greatly revived Lean's reputation.)

Roger Ebert, in writing of Doctor Zhivago, perhaps best sums up this view: [1]

I agree that the plot of "Doctor Zhivago" lumbers noisily from nowhere to nowhere. That the characters undergo inexplicable changes of heart and personality. That it is not easy to care much about Zhivago himself. . . That the life of the movie is in its corners. . . That "Lara's Theme," by Maurice Jarre, goes on the same shelf as "Waltzing Matilda" as tunes that threaten to drive me mad. And yet the stage has running water, and the horses look real enough to ride. "Doctor Zhivago". . . is an example of superb old-style craftsmanship at the service of a soppy romantic vision, and although its portentous historical drama evaporates once you return to the fresh air, watching it can be seductive.

[edit] Marriage

Lean was married six times, and divorced five — his last wife survived him:

  1. Isabel Lean (1930–1936) (David's first cousin) — one son Peter
  2. Kay Walsh (1940–1949)
  3. Ann Todd (1949–1957)
  4. Leila Matkar (1960–1978)
  5. Sandra Hotz (1981–1984)
  6. Sandra Cooke (1990–1991)

[edit] Trivia

  • Peter O'Toole's performance as an eccentric filmmaker in 1980s The Stunt Man was loosely based on Lean, who directed him in Lawrence of Arabia.
  • Lean was a long-term resident of Limehouse, East London. His home on Narrow Street is still owned by his family.
  • Often cited John Ford as one of his favorite directors, and used that director's The Searchers (1956) in particular as a reference point while shooting his epic films (e.g. Lawrence and Zhivago). Another major influence was King Vidor's The Big Parade (1926), which he directly referenced in a scene in Zhivago.
  • A favorite director of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and innumerable others. Lucas has referenced his films (Lawrence in particular) throughout his Star Wars film series.
  • Frequently attempted to work with Marlon Brando, in such roles as Victor Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago (which went to Rod Steiger) and the Major in Ryan's Daughter, and was also planning for him to be in his production of Nostromo which he had planned before his death, but he never wanted to give him the title role in Lawrence he preferred an English actor,Spiegel wanted Brando as "Lawrence" and not Lean.
  • Directed some scenes of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) while George Stevens was doing location work in Nevada. Most of his scenes involved Claude Rains and Jose Ferrer, both of whom had previously worked with Lean on Lawrence of Arabia.
  • Worked with Alec Guinness on six of his films. The two frequently fought with each other; Lean had adapted Guinness's stage version of Great Expectations for the screen for his second film, and thus felt responsible for Guinness's screen career; Guinness resented this assertion immensely. This, along with Guinness's perfectionism and difficult personality and what he perceived as Lean's authoritarian attitude while shooting a film, caused the two to quarrel on virtually all of their films together. Despite their differences, the two men held each other in high regard and continued to work together throughout their careers.
  • Among the films he attempted to make, but was forced to abandon or pass on to others, are The Wind Cannot Read (1958), The Bounty (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Empire of the Sun (1987).
  • In the second installment of the popular Hodge-Stansson "Unforgivable" series, its misogynist star exclaims to his girlfriend that he's brought over "Dr. Zhivago, Brief Encounter, and Bridge on the River Kwai; a LEAN night!"

[edit] Filmography

Awards
Preceded by
George Stevens
for Giant		 Academy Award for Best Director
1957
for The Bridge on the River Kwai		 Succeeded by
Vincente Minnelli
for Gigi
Preceded by
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
for West Side Story		 Academy Award for Best Director
1962
for Lawrence of Arabia		 Succeeded by
Tony Richardson
for Tom Jones

[edit] Quotation

"I wouldn't take the advice of a lot of so-called critics on how to shoot a close-up of a teapot."

[edit] References

[edit] External links

David Lean
1940s In Which We Serve (with Noel Coward) | This Happy Breed | Blithe Spirit | Brief Encounter | Great Expectations | Oliver Twist | The Passionate Friends
1950s Madeleine | The Sound Barrier | Hobson's Choice | Summertime | The Bridge on the River Kwai
1960s Lawrence of Arabia | Doctor Zhivago
1970s Ryan's Daughter
1980s A Passage to India
Television Lost and Found: The Story of Cook's Anchor (1979)
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