David Lean

Early life and education

David Lean was born on 25 March 1908 at 38 Blenheim Crescent, South Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labelled a "dud" of a student; he left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at the age of 18, and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice.

A more formative event for his career than his formal education was an uncle's gift, when Lean was aged ten, of a Brownie box camera. "You usually didn't give a boy a camera until he was 16 or 17 in those days. It was a huge compliment and I succeeded at it." Lean printed and developed his films, and it was his "great hobby". In 1923, his father deserted the family. Lean later followed a similar path after his own first marriage and child.

Career

Period as film editor

Bored by his work, Lean spent every evening in the cinema, and in 1927, after an aunt had advised him to find a job he enjoyed, he visited Gaumont Studios where his obvious enthusiasm earned him a month's trial without pay. He was taken on as a teaboy, promoted to clapperboy, and soon rose to the position of third assistant director. By 1930 he was working as an editor on newsreels, including those of Gaumont Pictures and Movietone, while his move to feature films began with Freedom of the Seas (1934) and Escape Me Never (1935).

He edited Gabriel Pascal's film productions of two George Bernard Shaw plays, Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). He edited Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). After this last film, Lean began his directing career, after editing more than two dozen features by 1942. As Tony Sloman wrote in 1999, "As the varied likes of David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher and Dorothy Arzner have proved, the cutting rooms are easily the finest grounding for film direction." David Lean was given honorary membership of the Guild of British Film Editors in 1968.

British films

His first work as a director was in collaboration with Noël Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), and he later adapted several of Coward's plays into successful films. These films are This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945) with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as quietly understated clandestine lovers, torn between their unpredictable passion and their respective orderly middle-class marriages in suburban England. The film shared Grand Prix honors at the 1946 Cannes film festival and garnered Lean his first Academy nominations for directing and screen adaptation, and Celia Johnson a nomination for Best Actress. It has since become a classic, one of the most highly regarded British films.

Two celebrated Charles Dickens adaptations followed – Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). David Shipman wrote in The Story of Cinema: Volume Two (1984): "Of the other Dickens films, only Cukor's David Copperfield approaches the excellence of this pair, partly because his casting, too, was near perfect". These two films were the first directed by Lean to star Alec Guinness, whom Lean considered his "good luck charm". The actor's portrayal of Fagin was controversial at the time. The first screening in Berlin during February 1949 offended the surviving Jewish community and led to a riot. It caused problems too in New York, and after private screenings, was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis. "To our surprise it was accused of being anti-Semitic", Lean wrote. "We made Fagin an outsize and, we hoped, an amusing Jewish villain." The terms of the production code meant that the film's release in the United States was delayed until July 1951 after cuts amounting to eight minutes.

The next film directed by Lean was The Passionate Friends (1949), an atypical Lean film, but one which marked his first occasion to work with Claude Rains, who played the husband of a woman (Ann Todd) torn between him and an old flame (Howard). The Passionate Friends was the first of three films to feature the actress Ann Todd, who became his third wife. Madeleine (1950), set in Victorian-era Glasgow is about an 1857 cause célèbre with Todd's lead character accused of murdering a former lover. "Once more", writes film critic David Thomson "Lean settles on the pressing need for propriety, but not before the film has put its characters and the audience through a wringer of contradictory feelings." The last of the films with Todd, The Sound Barrier (1952), has a screenplay by the playwright 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 the play by Harold Brighouse.

International films

Summertime (1955) marked a new departure for Lean. It was partly American financed, although again made for Korda's London Films. The film features Katharine Hepburn in the lead role as a middle-aged American woman who has a romance while on holiday in Venice. It was shot entirely on location there. Although best known for his epics, Lean's personal favourite of all his films was Summertime, and Hepburn was his favourite actress.

He developed The Wind Cannot Read but could not come to terms with Alex Korda and the Rank Organisation.

Lean's films now began to become infrequent but much larger in scale and more extensively released internationally. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was based on a novel by Pierre Boulle recounting the story of British and American prisoners of war trying to survive in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. The film stars William Holden and Alec Guinness and became the highest-grossing film of 1957 in the United States. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness, who had battled with Lean to give 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.

After extensive location work in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere, Lean's Lawrence of Arabia was released in 1962. This was the first project of Lean's with a screenplay by playwright Robert Bolt, rewriting an original script by Michael Wilson (one of the two blacklisted writers of Bridge on the River Kwai). It recounts the life of T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who is depicted in the film as uniting the squabbling Bedouin peoples of the Arab peninsula to fight in World War I and then push on for independence.

After some hesitation, Alec Guinness appeared here in his fourth David Lean film as the Arab leader Prince Faisal, despite his misgivings from their conflicts on Bridge on the River Kwai. French composer Maurice Jarre, on his first Lean film, created a soaring film score with a famous theme and won his first Oscar for Best Original Score. The film turned actor Peter O'Toole, playing Lawrence, into an international star. Lean was nominated for ten Oscars, winning seven, including two for Best Director. Lean remains the only British director to win more than one Oscar for directing.

Last years and unfulfilled projects

From 1977 until 1980, Lean and Robert Bolt worked on a film adaptation of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian, a dramatized account by Richard Hough of the Mutiny on the Bounty. It was originally to be released as a two-part film, one named The Lawbreakers that dealt with the voyage out to Tahiti and the subsequent mutiny, and the second named The Long Arm that studied the journey of the mutineers after the mutiny as well as the admiralty's response in sending out the frigate HMS Pandora, in which some of the mutineers were imprisoned. Lean could not find financial backing for both films after Warner Bros. withdrew from the project; he decided to combine it into one and looked at a seven-part TV series before getting backing from Italian mogul Dino De Laurentiis. The project then suffered a further setback when Bolt suffered a serious stroke and was unable to continue writing; the director felt that Bolt's involvement would be crucial to the film's success. Melvyn Bragg ended up writing a considerable portion of the script.

Lean was forced to abandon the project after overseeing casting and the construction of the $4 million Bounty replica; at the last possible moment, actor Mel Gibson brought in his friend Roger Donaldson to direct the film, as producer De Laurentiis did not want to lose the millions he had already put into the project over what he thought was as insignificant a person as the director dropping out. The film was eventually released as The Bounty.

Lean then embarked on a project he had pursued since 1960, a film adaptation of A Passage to India (1984), from E. M. Forster's 1924 novel of colonial conflicts in British-occupied India. Entirely shot on location in the sub-continent, this became his last completed film. He rejected a draft by Santha Rama Rau, responsible for the stage adaptation and Forster's preferred screenwriter, and wrote the script himself. In addition, Lean also edited the film with the result that his three roles in the production (writer, editor, director) were given equal status in the credits.

Lean recruited long-time collaborators for the cast and crew, including Maurice Jarre (who won another Academy Award for the score), Alec Guinness in his sixth and final role for Lean, as an eccentric Hindu Brahmin, and John Box, the production designer for Dr. Zhivago. Reversing the critical response to Ryan's Daughter, the film opened to universally enthusiastic reviews; the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and Lean himself nominated for three Academy Awards in directing, editing, and writing. His female star, in the complex role of a confused young British woman who falsely accuses an Indian man of attempted rape, gained Australian actress Judy Davis her first Academy nomination. Peggy Ashcroft, as the sensitive Mrs. Moore, won the Oscar for best supporting actress, making her, at 77, the oldest actress to win that award. According to Roger Ebert, it is "one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen".

Personal life

Lean was a long-term resident of Limehouse, East London.

His co-writer and producer, Norman Spencer, has said Lean was a "huge womaniser", and that "to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women". He was married six times, had one son, and at least two grandchildren—from all of whom he was completely estranged—and was divorced five times. He was survived by his last wife Sandra Cooke, art dealer and co-author (with Barry Chattington) of David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (2001), and by Peter Lean, his son from his first marriage.

His six wives were:

Isabel Lean (28 June 1930 – 1936) (his first cousin); one son, Peter.

Kay Walsh (23 November 1940 – 1949)

Ann Todd (21 May 1949 – 1957)

Leila Matkar (4 July 1960 – 1978) (from Hyderabad, India); Lean's longest-lasting marriage.

Sandra Hotz (28 October 1981 – 1984)

Sandra Cooke (15 December 1990 – 16 April 1991, Lean's death)

Lean died in Limehouse, London, on 16 April 1991, at the age of 83. He was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery.

Honours

Lean was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1953, and was knighted for his contributions and services to the arts in 1984. Lean received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990. In 2012, Lean was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—celebrating the British cultural figures of his lifetime that he most admires.

In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled its list of the Top 100 British films. Seven of Lean's films appeared on the list:

Brief Encounter (#2)

Lawrence of Arabia (#3)

Great Expectations (#5)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (#11)

Doctor Zhivago (#27)

Oliver Twist (#46)

In Which We Serve (#92)

In addition, on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of 100 Years...100 Movies, Lawrence of Arabia placed 5th, The Bridge on the River Kwai 13th, and Doctor Zhivago 39th. In the 2007 revised edition, Lawrence of Arabia placed 7th and The Bridge on the River Kwai placed 36th.

With five wins out of six nominations, Lean directed more films that won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the Oscars than any other director for: Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter—the last nomination being for A Passage to India.

Style

As Lean himself pointed out, his films are often admired by fellow directors as a showcase of the filmmaker's art. According to Katharyn Crabbe, "[t]he rewards of watching a David Lean film are most often described in terms of his skillful use of cinematic conventions, his editing, his alertness to the ability of film to create effects." In his introduction to David Lean: Interviews, Steven Organ claims that Lean "often straddl[ed] that fine line between commercialism and artistry. To view one of Lean's films is to see the complete spectrum of tools available to the filmmaker – and used to their fullest potential."

According to David Ehrenstein, "What all [his] brilliant, seemingly disparate works have in common is the clarity and precision of Lean's filmmaking technique, as well as his steely resolve in using it to attain poetic grandeur." Michael Sragow calls Lean "a superb romantic moviemaker and one of the slow but steady innovators of the cinema … Though Lean is usually praised for his 'film sense', as though it were divorced from his other faculties, he's done as much as men of the theater like Visconti to merge the illusions and grand passions of the stage with the verisimilitude and immediacy of the screen. His ability to combine factual filigree and larger-than-life characters in a sometimes hallucinatory atmosphere has inspired generations of filmmakers to try to fuse the most ruthless documentation with the most elaborate myth-making." He further highlights Lean's use of "highly charged staging and editing and a lucid, fluid realism to depict the contrast between ongoing life and life at its extremes."

On the occasion of Lean's centenary in 2008, writer and broadcaster Andrew Collins praised him as "more than just cinema's great choreographer of scale":

Certainly, he set the bar high for heavily populated, location-shot period sagas from literary sources, but it would be shortsighted to see Lean's greatest achievements as the filmic equivalent of skyscraping architectural edifices: good because they're there. The people may look like ants when first glimpsed against the vast sand dunes of an exacting Lean composition, or the icy Russian mountains, or the concrete façade of a dam, but we are soon invited to alight on individuals, and through the use of simple, visual clues, wonder about them and care about them.

Alain Silver analyses Lean's technique as "one that elucidates story and characters through pictures." He states that Lean is able to subjectify a film's perspective through visuals regardless of whether the film has a "third-person" or "first-person" narrative:

Themes

Steven Ross has written that Lean's films "reveal a consistently tragic vision of the romantic sensibility attempting to reach beyond the constraints and restrictions of everyday life", and that they tend to feature "intimate stories of a closely-knit group of characters [whose] fates are indirectly but powerfully shaped by history-shaking events going on around them." He further observes that, in his work, "setting [is used] as a presence with as much dramatic and thematic form as any character in the film." Similarly, Lean biographer Gene D. Phillips writes that the director "saw in his style an attraction to characters who refuse to accept defeat, even when their most cherished hopes go unfulfilled. His protagonists seek to transform their lives, but often fail to do so. Pip in Great Expectations, Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, among others, struggle against the limitations of their own personalities to achieve a level of existence that they deem higher or nobler."

According to Silver, "Lean's signature characters are ordinary dreamers and epic visionaries, people who want to transform the world according to their expectations... The tragic flaw in Lean's characters is a self-centeredness which can lead to misimpression, which can prevent them from seeing what is so clear to everyone else." In Sragow's view, Lean has "depicted the need for constricted modern men and women either to act out their dreams or preserve the life they have by making a scene or putting on a show―indulging in the histrionic to renew their sense of self and purpose."

Michael Newton of The Guardian, analysing Brief Encounter and Doctor Zhivago, says:

Today, 50 years on, we can see how the scale of Zhivago forms the measure of its appeal, and its gorgeousness seems intrinsic to one of cinema's virtues. With Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Lean is one of the greatest film directors this country has produced. Like all of them, he is a romantic, and romanticism was his subject matter: the flourishing and the breaking of inordinate desires, the dangerous lure of beauty, of adventure and the untrammelled life. Both films demonstrate the impossibility of an illicit love finding a place in the world. In Brief Encounter, social convention and decency prevent it; romance flourishes only to be worn out by the talk of casual acquaintances. In Doctor Zhivago, it is history and the political realm that prove to be love's enemy.

Legacy

Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese in particular are fans of Lean's epic films and claim him as one of their primary influences. Spielberg and Scorsese also helped in the 1989 restoration of Lawrence of Arabia, which had been substantially altered both by the studio in theatrical release and in particular in its televised versions; the theatrical re-release greatly revived Lean's reputation.

Several of the many other later directors who have acknowledged significant influence by Lean include Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Spike Lee, Sergio Leone, Sir John Boorman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lawrence Kasdan and Guillermo del Toro.

John Woo once named Lawrence of Arabia among his top three films. More recently, Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) has cited Lean's works, particularly Doctor Zhivago, as an important influence on his work, as has director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises).

The critical verdict was not unanimous, however. For example, David Thomson, writing about Lean in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, comments:From 1952 to 1991, he made eight films—and in only one of them, I suggest —Lawrence—is the spectacle sufficient to mask the hollow rhetoric of the scripts. But Lean before 1952 made eight films in ten years that are lively, stirring, and an inspiration—they make you want to go out and make movies, they are so in love with the screen's power and the combustion in editing." The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther dismissed Lawrence of Arabia as "a huge, thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit". Writing in The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris remarked that Lawrence was "simply another expensive mirage, dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal ... on the whole I find it hatefully calculating and condescending".

Award and nominations

Awards and nominations received by Lean's films

Directed Academy Award Performances