David Lean
David Lean was born in Croydon, England, United Kingdom on March 25th, 1908 and is the Director. At the age of 83, David Lean biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 83 years old, David Lean has this physical status:
Sir David Lean (25 March 1908 to April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor.
Lean, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors of all time, was best known for his large-scale epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984).
He also wrote adaptations of Charles Dickens' books Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), as well as the romantic comedy Brief Encounter (1945). Lean, a film editor who worked in film editing in the early 1930s, made his directorial debut with 1942's In Which We Serve, the first of four collaborations with Nol Coward.
Lean began making internationally co-produced films funded by major Hollywood studios in 1955; but, in 1970, his film Ryan's Daughter, which had a tragic failure, prompted him to take a fourteen-year absence from filmmaking, during which he planned a number of film projects that never came to fruition.
He had a career revival in 1984 with A Passage to India, a parody of E. M. Forster's book; it was an instant hit with critics, but it was to be Lean's last film to direct. Lean's affinity for pictorialism and innovative editing techniques has earned him to be lauded by filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott.
In the British Film Institute's "Top Directors" poll in 2002, Lean was named the ninth best film director of all time.
He was nominated seven times for the Academy Award for Best Director, which he received twice for The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, and seven films in the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films (with three of them being in the top five) and was named in 1990.
Early life and education
David Lean was born in 1808 at 38 Blenheim Crescent, Surrey, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). He was a pupil at Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading, and his parents were Quakers. Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), his younger brother, founded the first Inklings literary club while attending Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy demeanor, who left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at the age of 18, and joined his father's chartered accountant as an apprentice. When Lean was younger than his formal education, an uncle's gift was more relevant for his future than his formal education. "You could not give a child a camera until he was 16 or 17 years old in those days." It was a huge compliment, and I did a good job." Lean produced and directed his films, and it was his "great hobby." His father abandoned the family in 1923, and Lean would go on a similar route after his first marriage and child.
Personal life and honours
Lean was a long-serving resident of Limehouse, East London. His family still owns his house on Narrow Street. Lean's co-writer and producer Norman Spencer has said he was a "huge womanizer" and "to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women." He was married six times, had one son, and at least two grandchildren, none of whom were clearly disadvantaged—and was divorced five times. He was survived by his late wife, art dealer Sandra Cooke, co-author, and Peter Lean, his son from his first marriage.
His six wives were:
In 1953, Lean was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and was honoured for his contributions and services to the arts. In 1990, Lean was given the AFI Life Achievement Award. Lean was one of British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake in a new interpretation of his most popular work, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover features the British cultural figures of his life, which he most admires.
The British Film Institute assembled its list of the Top 100 British films in 1999; seven of Lean's films appeared on the list:
Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai 13th and Doctor Zhivago 39th, in addition to this; in the 2007 revised version, Lawrence of Arabia ranked 7th and The Bridge on the River Kwai placed 36th; in comparison to this.
With five out of six nominations for Great Expectations, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter, he directed more films that received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards than any other writer, including five for A Passage to India.
Lean died in Limehouse, London, on April 16, 1991, at the age of 83. He was laid to rest at Putney Vale Cemetery.
Career
Lean loved his job and spent every evening in the theatre, but in 1927, after an aunt had advised him to find a career he enjoyed, he went to Gaumont Studios, where his evident enthusiasm earned him a month of free trial. He was adopted as a teaboy, promoted to clapperboy, and quickly promoted to third assistant directorship. By 1930, he was working as an editor on newsreels, including those of Gaumont Pictures and Movietone, while his transition to feature films began with Freedom of the Seas (1934) and Escape Me Never (1935).
He edited Gabriel Pascal's film versions of two George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). Lean began filming after directing more than two dozen films in 1942. "As David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher, and Dorothy Arzner's diverse likes of him, the cutting rooms are certainly the best grounding for film direction," Tony Sloman wrote in 1999. In 1968, David Lean was granted honorary membership in the Guild of British Film Editors.
His first film role as a director was in collaboration with No.l Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), and he later turned several of Coward's scripts into hit films. These films are entitled This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Brief Encounter (1945), with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as young clandestine lovers caught between their volatile passion and their respective middle-class marriages in suburban England. At the 1946 Cannes film festival, Lean received his first Academy nominations for directing and screen adaptation, and Celia Johnson was nominated for Best Actress. It has since become a classic, one of Britain's most highly regarded British films.
Until recently, two iconic Charles Dickens adaptations were followed: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). "Of the other Dickens films, only Cukor's David Copperfield approaches the elegance of this pair, partially because his acting, too, was near perfect." These two films were Lean's first directed by Lean to actor Alec Guinness, whom Lean praised for his "good luck charm." Fagin's portrayal at the time was divisive. The first screening in Berlin in February 1949 offended the surviving Jewish community, sparking a riot. It caused problems in New York, and the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis condemned private screenings. "It's surprise" Lean wrote, "it was accused of being anti-Semitic." "We made Fagin an outsize and, we hoped, an amusing Jewish villain." Because of cuts amounting to eight minutes, the film's release in the United States was postponed until July 1951.
Lean's next film, The Passionate Friends (1949), a Lean film but one in which he met Claude Rains, who played the husband of a woman (Ann Todd) in a torn between him and an old flame (Howard). Ann Todd, the actress who became his third wife, appeared in the first of three films starring the actress. Madeleine (1950), set in Victorian-era Glasgow, is about an 1857 cause célèbre, with Todd's lead character convicted of murdering a former lover. "Lean relaxes on the pressing need for propriety, but not before the film introduces its characters and the audience with a wringer of contradictory emotions." The last of Todd's films, The Sound Barrier (1952), was directed by Terence Rattigan, and was the first of his three films for Sir Alexander Korda's London Films. Hobson's Choice (1954), with Charles Laughton in the lead, was based on Harold Brighouse's play.
Lean's time (1955) marked a new departure for the Lean family. It was partially funded by Americans, but Korda's London Films was still working. Katharine Hepburn plays a middle-aged American woman with a passion while on holiday in Venice. It was entirely shot on location. Although Lean's personal favorite of all his films was Summertime, and Hepburn his favorite actor.
Lean's films are now rare, but they're much larger in number and more widely distributed internationally. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was based on a book by Pierre Boulle about British and American prisoners of war who were fighting in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. William Holden and Alec Guinness appear in the film, which also became the country's highest-grossing film of 1957. It received seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness, who had battled with Lean to bring more depth to his role as an obsessively correct British commander who is determined to build the best possible bridge for his Japanese captors in Burma.
Lawrence of Arabia was launched in 1962 after extensive location work in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and other places. This was Lean's first venture with playwright Robert Bolt's screenplay rewriting an original script by Michael Wilson (one of the two blacklisted writers of Bridge on the River Kwai). It tells the story of T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who is depicted in the film as unifying the squabbling Bedouin peoples of the Arab peninsula to fight in World War I and then push for independence.
Alec Guinness appeared in his fourth David Lean film as the Arab king, although he suffered with their clashes on the River Kwai after some doubts. On his first Lean film score, French composer Maurice Jarre created a soaring film score based on a popular theme and received his first Oscar for Best Original Score. Peter O'Toole, a film turned actor starring Lawrence, was nominated for ten Oscars, winning seven, including Best Picture and Lean's second award for Best Director. He is the only British director to receive more than one award for his film.
Lean had his best box-office success with Doctor Zhivago (1965), a romance set during the Russian Revolution. The film, based on the banned book by Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Boris Pasternak, chronicles a brilliant and warm-hearted physician and poet (Omar Sharif) who, although seemingly happily married into the Russian aristocracy and a father, falls in love with a gorgeous teenage mother named Lara (Julie Christie) and tries to be with her in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War.
Initially, Doctor Zhivago's reviews were skeptic, but critics have since seen it as one of Lean's finest films, with film director Paul Greengrass calling it "one of cinema's greatest masterpieces." It is the 9th highest-grossing film of all time as adjusted for inflation as of 2020. Carlo Ponti, a filmmaker, based on Maurice Jarre's lush romantic score to create "Lara's Theme," a pop hit song with lyrics under the heading "Somewhere My Love," one of cinema's most popular theme songs. Freddie Young, the British director of photography, received an Academy Award for his color cinematography. Lean also produced some scenes from The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), while George Stevens was dedicated to location work in Nevada.
After an extended period on location in Ireland, Lean's Daughter (1970) was released. It is loosely based on Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary's doomed romance set against the backdrop of 1916 Ireland's rebellion against the British. Robert Mitchum, the aging Hollywood 'bad boy' in an uncharacteristic role as a long-suffering Irish husband and British actress Sarah Miles as his faithless young wife, receiving even less positive feedback than the director's earlier films, who were particularly savaged by New York critics. Some commentators complained that the film's large visual scale on stunning Irish beaches and extended running time did not support its small-scale romantic story. Nevertheless, the film was a box office hit, grossing $31 million and making it the 8th highest-grossing film of the year. The following year, it received two Academy Awards, one for cinematographer Freddie Young and the other for supporting actor John Mills in his role as a village halfwit.
Lean invited Lean to speak with the National Society of Film Critics and ask them why they opposed to the film. Lean says of the now famous luncheon, "I felt anxiety from the moment I sat down." Richard Schickel, a time critic, asked Lean ask how he, the maker of Brief Encounter, may have created "a piece of bullshit" like Ryan's Daughter. These writers laced the film for two hours to David Lean's face that the departed Lean had been barred from making films for a long time. In a later television interview, Lean said, "They just tore the film to bits." "It really had such an unhealthy effect on me for many years, but you may have guessed that maybe they're correct." Why on earth am I making films if I don't have to? One's confidence is shaken by this event."
Lean and Robert Bolt worked on a film adaptation of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian by Richard Hough of the Mutiny on the Bounty from 1977 to 1980. It was supposed to be released as a two-part film, one called The Lawbreakers that dealt with the voyage out to Tahiti and the subsequent mutiny, and the second, The Long Arm, which chronicled the mutineers' journey after the mutiny and the admiralty's reaction in sending out the frigate HMS Pandora, in which several of the mutineers were detained, as well as the admiralty's reaction when the mutineers were mutin After Warner Bros. pulled out of the project, Lean couldn't find financial support for both films; instead, he turned it into a seven-part television series before being backed by Italian mogul Dino De Laurentiis. Bolt's involvement in the project caused more setback when he suffered a serious stroke and was unable to continue writing; the director felt that Bolt's participation would be vital to the film's success. Melvyn Bragg ended up writing a major portion of the script.
After directing casting and the construction of the $4 million Bounty replica, Lean was forced to drop the film; actor Mel Gibson was brought in by friend Roger Donaldson to direct the film, but De Laurentiis did not want to risk losing the millions due to who seemed to be as insignificant as the director was dropping out. The Bounty film was eventually released as The Bounty.
Lean then embarked on a project he hadn't started since 1960, a film adaptation of A Passage to India (1984), E. M. Forster's 1924 novel of colonial conflicts in British-occupied India. This was the last completed film on location in the sub-continent. He rejected Santha Rama Rau's draft and Forster's preferred screenwriter, and wrote the script himself. In addition, Lean edited the film, resulting in Lean's that his three roles in the film (writer, editor, and director) were given equal credit in the credits.
Lean recruited long-time collaborators for the cast and crew, including Maurice Jarre (who received another Academy Award for his score), Alec Guinness, as an eccentric Hindu Brahmin in his sixth and final role), and John Box, the production designer for Dr. Zhivago. The film, which was reversing Ryan's Daughter's critical reaction, received widespread praise; it was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and Lean himself was nominated for three Academy Awards in directing, editing, and writing. Judy Davis, Australia's first Academy Award-winning male actress who mistakenly accuses an Indian man of rape, was nominated for his male role. Peggy Ashcroft, the sensitive Mrs. Moore, received the Oscar for best supporting actress, making her the oldest actress to win the award at 77. It is "one of the best screen adaptations I've ever seen," Roger Ebert says of it.
After director Harold Becker left the project, he was hired to oversee a Warner Bros.-backed adaptation of J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. Steven Spielberg was hired as a producer for Lean but later took over as director after Lean left; Spielberg was drawn to the possibility of filming due to his long-time love for Lean and his films. In 1987, Empire of the Sun was introduced.
Lean was in pre-production of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo during his last years. Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Quaid were among the cast members, as the title character. Alec Guinness had also wanted Alec Guinness to play Dr. Monygham, but the elderly actor refused to perform him in a 1989 letter: "I think it would be tragic casting." The only thing in the part in which I may have excelled was the crippled crab-like walk." Steven Spielberg came on board as a producer with the support of Warner Bros, but he left the project and was replaced by Serge Silberman, a respected producer at Greenwich Film Productions.
Several writers, including Christopher Hampton and Robert Bolt, were involved in the Nostromo project, but their work was eventually abandoned. Lean ultimately decided to write the film himself with the help of Maggie Unsworth (wife of renowned cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth), who had worked on the scripts for Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and The Passionate Friends. Originally, Lean considered filming in Mexico but later decided to film in London and Madrid, partly to protect O'Toole, who had said he would only film near to home. Nostromo had a total budget of $46 million and was six weeks away from filming at the time Lean's death from throat cancer. It was rumored that fellow film director John Boorman would take over the direction, but the project was shelved. In 1997, Nostromo was finally converted for the tiny screen with an unrelated BBC television mini-series.