Richard Attenborough

Richard Attenborough: Twenty Years for Gandhi

To keep one film alive he sold the thing that had made him rich. Attenborough had taken a ten per cent profit share in Agatha Christie's *The Mousetrap* when he originated Detective Sergeant Trotter in 1952, an annuity that would outlast almost everyone connected with it. He liquidated the stake, and parts of his art collection, and much of his savings, to hold together a $22 million biography of an Indian ascetic that every studio in the business had told him nobody wanted to watch.

The House That Took In Refugees

Richard Samuel Attenborough was born on 29 August 1923 in Cambridge, the eldest of three sons of Frederick Attenborough, a scholar and academic administrator, and Mary Clegg, a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council. The household's politics were practical: the Attenboroughs took in Basque children displaced by the Spanish Civil War and helped rescue Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Two younger brothers followed — John into the motor trade, David into the natural world. Richard was sent to Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester, had seen Chaplin's *The Gold Rush* and decided what he wanted, and won a scholarship to RADA. In the war he trained with the RAF, was seconded to its Film Production Unit at Pinewood, and flew as a tail gunner filming Bomber Command sorties, sustaining permanent ear damage.

Pinkie Brown and the Baby Face

He was nineteen when he played the sailor who loses his nerve in *In Which We Serve* (1942), and twenty-four when *Brighton Rock* (1947) made him. His Pinkie Brown — a razor-carrying adolescent with no floor under him — was, one critic wrote, blistering. The problem was the face. Attenborough was small and boyish, and British cinema of the 1950s had no use for a leading man who looked like a choirboy, so he spent a decade in service comedies like *Private's Progress* (1956) and *I'm All Right Jack* (1959). When the good parts came, they exploited precisely what had held him back: the mild exterior over something wrong. He won a BAFTA for *Guns at Batasi* (1964), unnerved audiences in *Séance on a Wet Afternoon* the same year, and in *10 Rillington Place* (1971) played the strangler John Christie as a soft-spoken, entirely ordinary man. Along the way came *The Great Escape* (1963), *The Sand Pebbles* and *Doctor Dolittle*, the last two bringing Golden Globes for supporting actor.

Beaver Films and the Turn to Directing

Frustration with the parts he was offered pushed him behind the camera early. With Bryan Forbes he founded Beaver Films in the late 1950s and produced *The Angry Silence* (1960), a hard film about a factory worker sent to Coventry by his own union, and *Whistle Down the Wind* (1961). He directed his first feature in 1969: *Oh! What a Lovely War*, the Joan Littlewood pierrot-show satire of 1914–18, rendered on the Brighton seafront with most of the British theatrical knighthood in it. *Young Winston* (1972) and *A Bridge Too Far* (1977) confirmed his taste for the large canvas; *Magic* (1978) proved he could do something small and nasty.

Twenty Years for Gandhi

*Gandhi* consumed roughly two decades of his life before a frame was shot. Producers considered the subject uncommercial; Paramount would fund it if Richard Burton played the Mahatma. Attenborough refused, cast the little-known Ben Kingsley, and mortgaged himself. The film took eight Academy Awards from eleven nominations in 1983, including Best Picture and Best Director, plus two BAFTAs and two Golden Globes; it drew sixteen BAFTA nominations, still the record, and returned $52.7 million. India gave him the Padma Bhushan. He also took the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolence Peace Prize, France's Legion of Honour and a BAFTA Fellowship in the same year.

Causes on Film

Everything after was recognisably the work of a man who thought cinema had a duty. "I want cinema to contribute to argument, to antagonism, to anger, whatever," he said, "but always related to human affairs and human decency." *Cry Freedom* (1987) put Steve Biko and apartheid in front of a mass audience; *Chaplin* (1992) gave Robert Downey Jr. the role that made him; *Shadowlands* (1993), his fifth film with Anthony Hopkins, was the quietest and possibly the best thing he directed. He kept acting for other people, most profitably as the dinosaur impresario John Hammond in *Jurassic Park* (1993) and as Kris Kringle in *Miracle on 34th Street* (1994). *Closing the Ring*, in 2007, was his last film as director.

The Institutional Englishman

No one in British film held more offices. He chaired the British Film Institute from 1981 to 1992, presided over RADA and BAFTA, was Chancellor of the University of Sussex from 1998 to 2008, spent thirty-three years as president of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, and gave Chelsea Football Club shares worth over £950,000 to stop it losing Stamford Bridge. He was knighted in 1976 and made a life peer in 1993, taking the Labour whip. Then, on 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami struck Khao Lak in Thailand and killed his daughter Jane, his fifteen-year-old granddaughter Lucy, and Jane's mother-in-law. He called it the worst day of his life, and built a creative centre for learning in Eswatini in Jane's name. He died on 24 August 2014, five days short of ninety-one, at Denville Hall, where he had moved to be with his wife of sixty-nine years, Sheila Sim.

Why Richard Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the word, where it is used of Attenborough, describes an impresario rather than an artist, and he would probably have accepted that. His own self-description was "a well-intentioned liberal." The specific and rare faculty was the ability to hold a single conviction steady for twenty years against unanimous professional advice, and then to convert it into logistics: financing, casting against every commercial instinct, and marshalling a production of tens of thousands of extras without losing the human scale. That is a real and uncommon intelligence, closer to generalship than authorship.

The counter-case is substantial and comes from serious critics. *Gandhi* itself was received as mixed: praised for high intelligence, attacked as heavy-handed and self-important, and criticised for sanitising its subject's private life — a charge Attenborough conceded rather than denied, arguing that a film costing a fortune has to speak "in the terms of a world mass media." Across his directing career reviewers found the work inconsistent and ponderous, the epics respectful to the point of embalming. As an actor he had a genuinely strange gift — the mild face concealing rot — but that is craft of a limited kind, not intellectual originality. Genius is the wrong instrument for measuring him; consequence is the right one.

Legacy

What Attenborough left is less a body of masterpieces than a demonstration that a mainstream British film could carry an argument about colonialism or apartheid to a global audience and win. He made Ben Kingsley's career and revived Robert Downey Jr.'s, propped up the BFI and RADA when both needed him, and never got the film about Thomas Paine he wanted most. Pinewood named a sound stage after him in 2012, which is roughly the right monument: a big empty room where things get built.

Achievements

• BAFTA Award for Best Film — 1983
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1988
• Notable work: A Bridge Too Far
• Notable work: Gandhi
• Notable work: Shadowlands
• Affiliated with University of Oxford
• Educated at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College and Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys
• Worked as screenwriter, film producer and film actor