“Gandhi” director dies at 90 years old – Hamburger Evening Gazette

08.26.14, 06:05

The British filmmaker Sir Richard Attenborough was a light hearted philanthropist

From ARMGARD Seegers

Hamburg. Sir Richard Attenborough, the actor and film director coined decades the British film industry, has died just days before his 91st birthday. He achieved his film “Gandhi”, with Ben Kingsley in the title role of world fame. But with works like “A Bridge Too Far” or “A Chorus Line” He has gone down in film history.

During his long career, Attenborough worked hardly anything so much as the life of Gandhi. He had planned the epic and collected money for more than two decades. The producers did not want the project. “No audience is interested in a little brown man, who walks around with a bed sheet and a Beanstalk” had a famous Hollywood producer rejected him.

Attenborough produced the film he was finally rewarded themselves., with eight Oscars, including for “Best Film” and “Best Director”. “I want to entertain the audience and thereby also thought-provoking,” Attenborough said always. But movie lovers not only remains the “Oscar” -Triumph in memory, but the three different personalities with whom Attenborough film history coined: that of small, childlike, sometimes anxious bargain-looking actor who could play the neurotic, slightly creepy characters later. The Lords called the director’s great epic films like “Gandhi” or “Chaplin” and the “Dickie” fighting rauschebärtig, omnipresent, and effervescent against injustice. In other way, was when his younger brother David, the expert on wildlife documentaries, Richard never saw so like he could have played a youthful lover.

All three personalities united Attenborough in a serene philanthropist and unflinching idealist who was more than half a century, an integrative force in British cultural life. All his life he devoted himself to the culture and has held numerous directorships, including the Channel 4 television, his former workplace RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) and the British Film Institute. He also served as UNICEF ambassador go. He was president of the National Film and Television School, Lecturer at the University of Oxford and popular guest professor and speaker.

He spent his youth in Leicester, his mother was president of the Leicester Little Theatre. Early on, he was interested in the stage. At 17, he got a scholarship to the prestigious RADA and moved to London to study. Already at the age of 18 he made his debut as an actor in the theater. He was the first detective in Agatha Christie’s London “mousetrap”. Soon Attenborough went to the movie. In “The Great Escape” (“The Great Escape”, 1963), the prisoner of the classic director John Sturges, succeeded him on the side of Steve McQueen the big breakthrough. His enthusiasm for acting but held within limits: “I was in movies always one of those guys who were allowed to play only on the lower decks of the Navy Her Majesty I had such a chubby face, that I, as a 25-year-old still. 15-year-old should play. ” After nearly three decades, he himself began to make films, out of frustration, as he once confessed.

But he also acted further as an actor, about 1993, as an eccentric billionaire in Spielberg’s dinosaur movie “Jurassic Park”. In “Doctor Doolittle” he played alongside Rex Harrison a whimsical ringmaster. In the romantic Christmas movie “The Miracle of Manhattan” (“The Miracle on 34th Street”, 1994) he proclaimed between bright eyes of children and skeptical adults as an old man with white beard, the good news.

Attenborough was knighted in 1976 by Queen Elizabeth II.. 1993, he was the Queen to Lord Attenborough of Richmond-on-Thames and gave him so that the authority to make policy in the House of Lords. As a director, he saw himself as a partner of the actor. She liked to play with him in “A Bridge Too Far” among others, Laurence Olivier, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine and others. In “Cry Freedom” (1987) he committed against the apartheid. “With my work I have always tried to take a stand,” Richard Attenborough said. “I spoke against the establishment, against the authorities, have fought against intolerance and against prejudice.”

Richard Attenborough was the father of three children. Son Michael is also an actor and director. Mary Jane daughter and granddaughter Lucy Elizabeth had come the 2004 tsunami in South Asia killed. Last March it was announced that Attenborough together with his wife Sheila Sim, a former actress with whom he had been married more than 60 years, lives in a nursing home for the cultural sector in London. There he is, after a brief illness, now dead.