John Schlesinger

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John Schlesinger

Born

John Richard Schlesinger
February 16, 1926
London, England

Died

July 25, 2003 (aged 77)
Palm Springs, California

Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Director 1969 Midnight Cowboy
BAFTA Awards
Best Short Film 1961 Terminus Best Direction 1969 Midnight Cowboy 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday Best Single Drama 1983 An Englishman Abroad 1992 A Question of Attribution

John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (February 16, 1926 – July 25, 2003) was an Academy Award-winning English film director.

1 Biography
2 Filmography
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Schlesinger was born in London into a middle class Jewish family,^[1] the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician.^[2] He went on to work in television as an actor after graduating from Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford.

[edit] Career

One of his first movies, the documentary Terminus (1960), earned him a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were concerned with the life of characters based in the North of England. His third Darling (1965) described tartly the modern urban way of life in London and was one of the first films about swinging London. Schlesinger's next movie was Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's popular novel. Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) was internationally acclaimed and it won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

His later films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Yanks (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), A Question of Attribution (1991), The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000). Schlesinger also directed Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London's Piccadilly Theatre. From 1973 he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre.

Openly gay, Schlesinger dealt with homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Next Best Thing.

Schlesinger also directed a notable party political broadcast for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom general election, 1992 which featured Prime Minister John Major returning to Brixton in south London where he had spent his teenage years, which highlighted his humble (and atypical for a traditional Conservative) background.

[edit] Death

Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, before suffering a stroke in December 2000. He was taken off life support at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs on July 24, 2003 by his life partner of over 30 years, photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger died early the following day at the age of 77.