Richard Attenborough was a lord, an Oscar-winning director for Gandhi and a pillar of British cinema. However, Attenborough, who died on Sunday aged 90, was best known as Dickie.
Baby-faced as a young actor and whitely bearded in older age, Attenborough presided over six decades of British moviemaking as both an actor and filmmaker with a genial warmth that endeared him to his fans and fellow actors.
“I have no great interest in being remembered as a great creative filmmaker,” he told the New York Times when Gandhi was released in 1982. “I want to be remembered as a storyteller.”
Photo: AFP
British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a statement calling Attenborough “one of the greats of cinema.”
Ben Kingsley, who shot to stardom for his performance as Mahatma Gandhi, recalled Attenborough’s passionate 20-year struggle to bring Gandhi’s story to the big screen. The film won eight Oscars, including best picture, best director for Attenborough and best actor for Kingsley.
A product of the UK’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Attenborough made his screen debut in the patriotic 1942 World War II film In Which We Serve.
He served, too, in the UK Royal Air Force, and afterward became one of the best-known actors of post-War Britain.
He transitioned into directing beginning with 1969’s World War I musical comedy Oh! What a Lovely War. He directed 12 films altogether, including A Bridge Too Far, A Chorus Line, Cry Freedom Chaplin and Shadowlands.
The son of a university principal, Attenborough was born Aug. 29, 1923, into a family with strong liberal views and a tradition of volunteer work for humanitarian concerns. One of his younger brothers is naturalist David Attenborough, whose documentaries have reached audiences around the world.
In his 1942 film debut as a terrified warship’s crewman in In Which We Serve, a 19-year-old Richard Attenborough made a small part into one of the most memorable roles in the movie, which won the Oscar for best picture.
In 1947, he gave one of the best performances of his career as the teenage thug Pinkie in Brighton Rock, the film version of Graham Greene’s novel.
In 1959, he joined fellow actor Bryan Forbes in film production. The Angry Silence in 1960 was their successful debut, with Attenborough playing a strike-breaking factory worker. It was one of the first of the gritty, working-class films that heralded the UK’s “new realism” of the 1960s.
In 1969, he turned to directing with Oh What a Lovely War, a lampoon of World War I, which won a Golden Globe award for best English-language foreign film.
Attenborough was often thought to be at his best when trying to coax the finest work from actors. Gandhi made a star of its little-known leading man, Kingsley, and Denzel Washington won an Oscar nomination for 1987’s Cry Freedom.
“The people I want to reach are those who have never even considered the whole question of South Africa. In order to do that, you have to make a film that is fundamentally entertaining. I’m in the entertainment business; I’m not a politician,” he told reporters at the time.
“I make movies for millions of people all over the world,” he said.
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