Monuments of cinema history: Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley at the filming of “Gandhi” (1982). The film won eight Oscars.
If knights and barons, lords, Prime Minister and colleagues unanimously complain: “We will miss him”, then it must be a truly Great died. Sir Richard Attenborough was a big one. A great Englishman first, a man with a huge heart, a man who wanted to preserve the institutions of the empire, which had gone down in his lifetime, in all its glory – BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (and thus the counterpart to American Academy) as well as the BBC, the British Film Institute, the Labour Party and Chelsea.
author. Verena Lueken, born in 1955, editor of the features section Follow:
For all these clubs, academies and institutions he was at one time president, director, member or at least close advisers. As a dedicated benefactor he was loved. A great actor he was. And a director who has created “Gandhi” an epic of truly commonwealth-like dimension. A British Monument. He was ninety years old. In his life, his work, it all came together.
He survived as a pilot in the Royal Air Force war because he was a very young man, only nineteen when he was drafted in 1942 as a soldier in the Second World War. His acting roles in movies such as “Brighton Rock”, in which he in 1947 a youthful murderer was, on “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Great Escape” to “Doctor Dolittle” showed him as an actor without a role stereotype that in a circle of other could argue Stars. He had his first film not yet turned a director and his most famous as an actor and not as it was, we are in 1976, beaten for his performances on camera from the Queen already knighted.
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probably remember not many people vividly of these films, the most famous after the war and before Attenborough work “Gandhi” emerged. They all have long since got offshoots, as remakes, television series and video games – as “The Great Escape”, the POW breakout film “The Great Escape”, which under this title, the German audience not only with Attenborough, but also with Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson made familiar.
But the British film noir “Brighton Rock” on a novel by Graham Greene, who also wrote the screenplay, is a second, a third look. Attenborough has not often men of such malicious cruelty and Tormented awareness played as the young Pinkie Brown in this film by John Boulting.
As he began to direct and produce, he passed slowly from acting, but Steven Spielberg succeeded in 1993 to lure him again before the camera. A whole generation of cinema audiences has Attenborough therefore only know as septuagenarian, in the role of multi-billionaire and dinosaur park owner in “Jurassic Park” – in amazement caring about his own work, on came to life dinosaurs, with a glance in the most dire situations, touching his grandchildren and always full of responsibility, a kindly great-uncle for those who need a benevolent great-uncle. So for all.
Excerpt from “Jurassic Park” © movie clips As a director Attenborough turned only twelve films that “Gandhi” and “Cry Freedom” are the most important, both movies about great men who stood up to colonial rule of England, one in India, the other, Nelson Mandela, in South Africa. Attenborough used the cinema with all its time still analogue means, with extras masses, large sets, spectacular scenes and naturalistic narrative violence to the story in which England’s World Power forfeited to erect a monument. And for that love him above all and with all her strength the English.
And those with whom he has worked. Ben Kingsley, meanwhile, struck a knight, as Gandhi was an international star in the film and the man for big men, he later played Lenin, Schindler’s secretary and Simon Wiesenthal. Kingsley was one of the first who gave expression in the web of grief over the death of Sir Richard Attenborough. The comprehensive revered great Briton, born on August 29, 1923 in Cambridge, died on August 24. His wife Sheila Sim, with whom he had been married since 1945 and for whose care he had retired from public life a few years ago, survived him.
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