Lord Attenborough

Lord Attenborough was a pillar of British cinema whose career spanned six decades and who, as a director, won eight Oscars for his sweeping biopic of Gandhi

Lord Attenborough, the actor and director who has died aged 90, was one of the pillars of British cinema, originally as an actor and subsequently as an Oscar-winning director; his 1982 biopic, Gandhi, won best film of the year in the annual Academy Awards, Attenborough himself being named best director and Ben Kingsley best actor in the title role.

Having first made his name on screen in his student days, playing a Navy stoker, terrified under fire, in the war film In Which We Serve (1942), Richard Attenborough was just 24 years old at the time of filming in his standout role as Pinkie, the adolescent gangster of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. It was a part he had already played briefly on the stage, and in the cinema, close-ups allowed him to deepen the performance to chilling effect. “The face, with its cod eyes and tight lips, is both brutal and angelic”, wrote Steve Chibnall in his 2005 British Film Guide, and in the course of the film’s taut 90 minutes Attenborough applied himself to the whole gamut of Pinkie’s warped emotional range, from dead-eyed brutality to sweating, gaping fear.

^{Attenborough as Pinkie in 'Brighton Rock'} 

In later years his own warmth of personality came to the fore, and with Jurassic Park (1993) he endeared himself to whole new generation of fans, playing an avuncular professor whose naiviety almost proves fatal when things go awry at his dinosaur-filled island theme park.

But it was Gandhi that was the apex of Richard Attenborough’s career and displayed a facility, unsuspected in his acting days, for handling large casts and epic, sweeping narratives. The film had a long and difficult gestation. As he later recalled in in a book, In Search of Gandhi (1982) his obsession with the leader of India’s non-violent independence movement had begun in 1962 when he sketched out plans for the film and approached Lord Mountbatten, who effected an introduction to Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, and Indira Gandhi, his daughter, both of whom approved of the project. However early preparations collapsed when Nehru died. It would be another 18 years before shooting began, with a $22 million budget made possible thanks to promptings by Mrs Gandhi, who persuaded India’s National Film Development Corporation to stump up a third if western backers would guarantee the rest.

The premiere in New Delhi in 1982, followed within a week by openings in London and America, took place almost exactly two years after the start of production. It met with an almost universally favourable, even fulsome, press for its hugely impressive cinematography and Attenborough’s grasp of spectacle — shown in his brilliant direction of such historic turning points as the Amritsar massacre of 1919. It won eight Oscars, more than any other British film had done up until that time.

^{Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley with their Oscars in 1983} 

Richard Attenborough also had a wide range of interests outside the film industry, and at various times was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University, a governor of the National Film School and a director (1969-82) of Chelsea Football Club, of which he was later made life vice-president.

His mother had been a radical and was active in the Labour Party, but Richard’s personal politics played little conspicuous part in his movies beyond a broad commitment to humane subjects and noble themes. He was a natural choice as the first practising film-maker to be appointed chairman of the British Film Institute, a post he held from 1982 to 1992. It set a pattern later followed by his successors, who were also film-makers – Alan Parker and Anthony Minghella.

Richard Samuel Attenborough was born in Cambridge on August 29 1923, the eldest of three sons of Frederick Levi Attenborough, then a don at Emmanuel College and author of a textbook on Anglo-Saxon law. Richard’s younger brother, David, became famous in his own right for his groundbreaking television documentaries on wildlife.

The family grew up in a crusading atmosphere. Mrs Attenborough was a founder member of the Marriage Guidance Council and the bookshelves were heavy with weighty tomes published by the Left Book Club. Political convictions were accompanied by good works. During and after the war, the Attenboroughs took in two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, who remained with them for seven years.

When Richard was nine, the family moved to Leicester, where his father had become head of the University. Richard attended Wyggeston Grammar School, but was the least academic of the Attenborough boys, always favouring play-acting to erudition. At the age of 12, he hired a venue in Leicester to stage a programme of sketches, harmonica solos and comic songs. His mother became president of the Leicester Little Theatre and was able to steer him in the direction of small parts. In 1941 he successfully auditioned for RADA. There he met another aspiring actress, Sheila Sim, whom he later married.

While still a student, he was cast in his first film, In Which We Serve (1942), Noel Coward’s patriotic study of how the war affected the crew of a Royal Navy destroyer. Though Coward himself played the lead, it was Attenborough’s contribution that the audience remembered. As the young stoker who attempts to overcome his abject terror as his ship comes under attack, he provided a character with whom filmgoers everywhere could identify.

Attenborough himself served in the war in the RAF, which he joined in 1943, and was posted to the RAF Film Unit, where he acted in Journey Together (1945) as a trainee pilot shot down over the North Sea. The film was part of the war effort and designed to cement the special relationship with America, represented in the film by Edward G Robinson, who waived his fee for playing a flying instructor.

In 1948, the same year as Brighton Rock, he played another murderer (this time awaiting execution) in London Belongs to Me, and – in the most eccentric role he was ever asked to play – appeared in The Guinea Pig, as a 15-year-old working-class boy sent to a public school as part of the post-war Labour government’s educational experiments. At this time he acted for the theatre as well as the cinema – notably in a two-year attachment as the detective in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952) at the start of its record-breaking run. His wife Sheila was also in the cast.

^{Attenborough with his wife Sheila} 

In the cinema, Attenborough became typecast. He was first choice for roles in uniform in such films as Morning Departure (1950), The Gift Horse (1952) and Dunkirk (1958), or as youthful offenders, as in Boys in Brown (1950) and Eight o’clock Walk (1954).

Deeply frustrated, he contacted an old friend, Bryan Forbes, whose career had also stalled, and in 1959 they established their own company, Beaver Films, to seek out more rewarding material. Their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), was made for less than £100,000 – a small sum, even then, by film industry standards. Forbes wrote the script, Attenborough played the lead and the subject was a hot potato in those days – the power of trades unions and their ability to ostracise and punish fellow workers who refuse to join a wildcat strike.

None of the Beaver films that followed had quite the same impact, but all were challenging. The League of Gentlemen (1960), in which Attenborough acted, was a caper movie with sardonic undertones. In Whistle Down the Wind (1961), which Attenborough produced and Forbes directed, Alan Bates as a bearded killer on the run is mistaken by a gullible little girl (Hayley Mills) for the risen Christ.

Forbes also directed the last two Beaver pictures: The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), in which Attenborough played the husband of a fake spiritualist (Kim Stanley) who inveigles him into a scam involving the kidnapping of a rich man’s daughter and the apparently miraculous ability to reveal the child’s whereabouts. Distributors, however, had no confidence in the picture, according it only a patchy release and forcing Beaver to wind up.

By this time, Attenborough had conceived the idea for Gandhi, but his failure to find backing for the project forced him, for the time being, to concentrate on acting. He decided to accept offers from Hollywood. Flight of the Phoenix (1966), The Sand Pebbles (1967) and Dr Dolittle (also 1967) were all disappointing. But 10 Rillington Place (1970), directed by Richard Fleischer, was a remarkable return to form. Attenborough played the mass murderer John Christie, for whose crimes Timothy Evans was wrongly executed. A miscarriage of justice that eventually contributed to the abolition in Britain of capital punishment, it provided Attenborough with his most memorable role since Brighton Rock.

Attenborough had another stroke of luck when John Mills asked him in 1969 to direct a film version of Joan Littlewood’s Stratford East production of Oh! What a Lovely War. This was the practical experience Attenborough would need if he was ever to get his Gandhi film off the ground. But it required more money than either Mills or Attenborough could raise.

With the finished script, Attenborough went to Hollywood to see Charles Bludhorn, then the head of Paramount. It is said that Attenborough sang him the score, danced on the carpet – and Bludhorn was so intrigued that he authorised studio backing for a $6 million budget on the spot.

To everyone’s surprise, the film was a huge success – artistically and at the box office. A portrait of life in the trenches in the First World War, it was set partly on the front line (actually the South Downs in Sussex, standing in for the Somme) and partly on Brighton Pier, where the British High Command, entirely oblivious to the carnage, conducts the war like a concert party. The mounting numbers of the dead and dying are run up on a cricket scoreboard. The end – a track back from a few little white crosses to a field full of them – makes the point more powerfully than words.

It was a promising beginning for an untried director, but hard to live up to, and some felt that many of Attenborough’s biggest spectacles failed to deliver. Young Winston (1972), about Churchill’s early life (education at Harrow, service in the Boer War, first parliamentary speech as MP for Oldham), was a stolid trek through the beginnings of a career that flourished only with the outbreak of the Second World War. A Bridge Too Far (1977), based on Cornelius Ryan’s account of the disastrous airborne attack on Arnhem, ran for three hours, with a plethora of highly paid, underemployed stars in cameo roles, and was barely distinguishable from Hollywood war epics such as Battle of the Bulge and The Longest Day, about the D-Day landings.

Attenborough’s Gandhi film came at the right time, though it marked the high point in his directorial career. His1985 film of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line was criticised in the United States, which resented an Englishman tampering with an essentially American genre. His next film, Cry Freedom (1987), addressed the life of the doomed South African civil rights leader Steve Biko, but it lacked the sweep of Gandhi; and his biopic of the early life of Chaplin (1992), with the title role played by Robert Downey Jr, had no discernible view of an artist who had been deeply controversial in life.

^{In 'Jurassic Park', with Laura Dern and Sam Neill} 

Though, as a director, Attenborough is best remembered for his “blockbusters”, he also made more modest, intimate pictures. Magic (1978), for example, was a variant on the episode in Dead of Night in which a ventriloquist is taken over by his dummy; while Shadowlands (1993), which also starred Anthony Hopkins, was a delicate and moving adaptation of William Nicholson’s play about the unlikely friendship between CS Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham.

His other films included In Love and War (1997) , about the young Ernest Hemingway and the nurse who cared for him in the First World War (the nucleus of the relationship that Hemingway developed as A Farewell to Arms). Grey Owl (2000) concerns a trapper (Pierce Brosnan) turned conservationist in the 1930s who falls in love with an Iroquois woman. His last film, Closing the Ring, a sentimental love story, was released in 2007.

Richard Attenborough continued to enjoy acting throughout his career as a director. As well as his role in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, He put in a star turn as Kriss Kringle in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and turned his hand to the musical genre – even singing a few lines – at the age of 75 in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999), the filmed version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical.

Attenborough was appointed CBE in 1967, knighted in 1976 and created a life peer in 1993. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1988.

His wife, Sheila Sim, whom he married in 1945, survives him. She abandoned her own career as an actress to bring up their son and two daughters, but in later years she served as a magistrate and was active in a number of charities. Their son is the theatre director Michael Attenborough. Their older daughter, Jane Holland, and Jane’s daughter Lucy died in the tsunami that struck Thailand on Boxing Day 2004. In their memory, Attenborough set up the Jane Holland Creative Centre for Learning in Swaziland.

Lord Attenborough, August 29 1923, died August 24 201
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