Richard Attenborough, Actor, Director and Giant of British Cinema, Dies at 90
Richard Attenborough,
who after a distinguished stage and film acting career in Britain
reinvented himself to become the internationally admired director of the
monumental “Gandhi” and other films, died on Sunday. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his son, Michael, according to the BBC.
Until
the early 1960s, Mr. Attenborough was a familiar actor in Britain but
little known in the United States. In London he was the original
detective in Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap.” On the British
screen, he made an early mark as the sociopath Pinkie Brown in an
adaptation of Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock” (1947).
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| Richard Attenborough, Actor, Director and Giant of British Cinema, Dies at 90 |
Hollywood Breakthrough
But it was not until he appeared with his friend Steve McQueen and a sterling ensemble cast in the 1963 war film “The Great Escape,”
his first Hollywood feature, that he found a trans-Atlantic audience.
His role, as a British officer masterminding an escape plan from a
German prisoner-of-war camp, was integral to one of the most revered and
enjoyable of all World War II films.
That
performance established him in Hollywood and paved the way for a series
of highly visible roles. He was the alcoholic navigator alongside James
Stewart’s pilot in “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), a survival story about a plane crash in the desert. He won back-to-back Golden Globe Awards for best supporting actor: first in “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), also starring McQueen, set during China’s civil war in the 1920s, and then in the whimsical “Doctor Dolittle”
(1967), playing Albert Blossom, a circus owner, alongside Rex Harrison
as the veterinarian who talks to animals. In “The Chess Players” (1977),
by the renowned Indian director Satyajit Ray, he was a British general
in 19th-century India.
Years
later Mr. Attenborough became known to a new generation of filmgoers as
the wealthy head of a genetic engineering company whose cloned
dinosaurs run amok in Steven Spielberg’s box office hit “Jurassic Park.”
But for most of Mr. Attenborough’s later career, his acting was sporadic while he devoted much of his time to directing.
Directing a Classic
“Gandhi” (1982), an epic but intimate biographical film, was his greatest triumph.
With
the little-known Ben Kingsley in the title role, the film traces
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s life as an Indian lawyer who forsakes his job and
possessions and takes up a walking staff to lead his oppressed country’s
fight for independence from Britain through a campaign of passive
resistance, ending in his assassination.
Among
the film’s critics were historians, who said it contributed to
mythmaking, portraying Gandhi as a humble man who brought down an empire
without acknowledging that the British, exhausted by World War II, were
eager to unload their Indian possessions. Nevertheless, “Gandhi” was
nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won eight, including best picture,
best director, best cinematography, best original screenplay and best
actor (Mr. Kingsley).
Mr.
Attenborough brought the film to fruition after a 20-year battle to
raise money and interest often reluctant Hollywood producers, one of
whom famously predicted that there would be no audience for “a little
brown man in a sheet carrying a beanstalk.” (Mr. Attenborough ended up
producing it himself.)
Mr.
Attenborough mortgaged his house in a London suburb, sold works of art
and, as he put it, spent “so much money I couldn’t pay the gas bill.”
The
film had 430 speaking parts and used over 300,000 extras for Gandhi’s
funeral. No one expected it to recoup its $22 million cost, but it wound
up earning 20 times that amount.
By
then Mr. Attenborough had embraced the role of director, or
“actor-manager,” as he called himself. (He said he understood actors and
could help them give confident, truthful performances.) His first foray
into directing was “Oh! What a Lovely War” (1969), an offbeat satirical
musical about World War I with an all-star cast including Laurence
Olivier, Maggie Smith, John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave.
Directing a Classic
“Gandhi” (1982), an epic but intimate biographical film, was his greatest triumph.
With
the little-known Ben Kingsley in the title role, the film traces
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s life as an Indian lawyer who forsakes his job and
possessions and takes up a walking staff to lead his oppressed country’s
fight for independence from Britain through a campaign of passive
resistance, ending in his assassination.
Among
the film’s critics were historians, who said it contributed to
mythmaking, portraying Gandhi as a humble man who brought down an empire
without acknowledging that the British, exhausted by World War II, were
eager to unload their Indian possessions. Nevertheless, “Gandhi” was
nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won eight, including best picture,
best director, best cinematography, best original screenplay and best
actor (Mr. Kingsley).
Mr.
Attenborough brought the film to fruition after a 20-year battle to
raise money and interest often reluctant Hollywood producers, one of
whom famously predicted that there would be no audience for “a little
brown man in a sheet carrying a beanstalk.” (Mr. Attenborough ended up
producing it himself.)
Mr.
Attenborough mortgaged his house in a London suburb, sold works of art
and, as he put it, spent “so much money I couldn’t pay the gas bill.”
The
film had 430 speaking parts and used over 300,000 extras for Gandhi’s
funeral. No one expected it to recoup its $22 million cost, but it wound
up earning 20 times that amount.
By
then Mr. Attenborough had embraced the role of director, or
“actor-manager,” as he called himself. (He said he understood actors and
could help them give confident, truthful performances.) His first foray
into directing was “Oh! What a Lovely War” (1969), an offbeat satirical
musical about World War I with an all-star cast including Laurence
Olivier, Maggie Smith, John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave.
Unlike his brothers — David, who became a noted biologist and television
broadcaster, and John, who went into the auto business — Richard was an
academic failure who was happiest when performing in plays. He
determined on an acting career, he said, after seeing Chaplin in “The Gold Rush” in 1935 on a trip to London with his father.
“I
saw people laughing and crying into their handkerchiefs,” he once said,
“and on the train back to Leicester, I said to myself, ‘I want to do
that, too.’ ”
Leaving
school at 16, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Arts and eventually married a fellow student, Sheila Sim, who became a
well-known actress herself before abandoning the theater to look after
their three children and become a magistrate.
Besides
his wife and son, Michael, survivors include a daughter, Charlotte
Attenborough. Another daughter, Jane Holland, died in the Indian Ocean
tsunami of 2004 along with her daughter, Lucy.
Even
before he joined the Royal Air Force as a military cameraman in 1943,
photographing German-held sites before and after bombing, Mr.
Attenborough was performing. He made his professional stage debut while
still in school, in 1941, in “Ah, Wilderness!” Noël Coward cast him as a terrified boy sailor in the 1942 film “In Which We Serve,” and he made his West End debut as the bitter young hero in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!”
More
substantial success came with his role as the teenage Pinkie in
“Brighton Rock,” in 1947, followed a year later by a much-praised
performance as a working-class adolescent in an elite school in “The Guinea Pig,” renamed “The Outsider” in the United States. By the end of the 1940s he had a fan club of 15,000.
For
the next decade and a half, Mr. Attenborough acted primarily in
British-made films. Then came “The Great Escape.” Though McQueen was the
film’s undeniable star, as a jaunty, rebellious American, Mr.
Attenborough turned in a calm but commanding performance as a squadron
leader.
Two
years later he won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award
for his performance in “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” (1964) as the seedy
husband of a neurotic psychic (Kim Stanley) with whom he schemes to
kidnap a wealthy girl. The film was one of many he made with his own
production company, Beaver Films, formed with the director Bryan Forbes.
Later Roles
He continued to act sporadically in the 1970s — notably as the British serial killer John Christie in “10 Rillington Place”
(1971) — and then largely disappeared from the screen until he ended a
long hiatus in 1993 with his supporting role in “Jurassic Park.” There
were subsequent film roles — among them Kris Kringle in a 1994 remake of
“Miracle on 34th Street,”
the English ambassador in Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour version of
“Hamlet” (1996) and the chief adviser of Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett) in
“Elizabeth” (1998) — but by then Mr. Attenborough was devoting most of his time to directing.
One film he took particular pride in was “Shadowlands”
(1993), an elaborate adaptation of William Nicholson’s play about the
love affair between C. S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and a divorced
American woman (Debra Winger). But he also knew failures, like “In Love and War” (1996), a Hemingway biopic with Chris O’Donnell and Sandra Bullock, and “Grey Owl” (1999), starring Pierce Brosnan as a Canadian trapper.
In
his later years Mr. Attenborough was chancellor of the University of
Sussex, stepping down in 2008. He returned to directing in 2007 with “Closing the Ring,”
a romantic drama starring Shirley MacLaine. But the prospective film
that had come to preoccupy him almost as much as “Gandhi,” a biography
of Tom Paine, remained unmade at his death.
In
2008, in collaboration with his longstanding associate Diana Hawkins,
he published an autobiography, “Entirely Up to You, Darling.” The book
chronicles a full and eventful life. But it ends with the death of his
daughter and granddaughter in the 2004 tsunami, and his regretting the
time he never spent with them.
“Work,” he wrote, “always took precedence.”
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