John Schlesinger

John Richard Schlesinger CBE (/ˈʃlɛsɪndʒər/ SHLESS-in-jər; 16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director, and actor. He emerged in the early 1960s as a leading light of the British New Wave, before embarking on a successful career in Hollywood, often directing films dealing frankly in provocative subject matter, combined with his status as one of the rare openly gay directors working in mainstream films.

Schlesinger started his career making British dramas A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and was Oscar-nominated for Darling (1965) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). He gained acclaim for his Hollywood films The Day of the Locust (1975), and Marathon Man (1976). His later films include Madame Sousatzka (1988) and Cold Comfort Farm (1995). He also served as an associate director of the Royal National Theatre.

Over his career he received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, and four BAFTA Awards as well as nominations for three Golden Globe Awards. In 1970, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to film, and in 2002, he was made a BAFTA Fellow. Four of Schlesinger's films are on the British Film Institute's Top 100 British films.

Early life

Schlesinger was born and raised in Hampstead, London, in a Jewish family, the eldest of five children of distinguished Emmanuel College, Cambridge–educated paediatrician and physician Bernard Edward Schlesinger OBE FRCP (1896–1984), who had also served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a brigadier, and his wife Winifred Henrietta, daughter of Hermann Regensburg, a stockbroker from Frankfurt. She had left school at 14 to study at the Trinity College of Music, and later studied languages at the University of Oxford for three years. Bernard Schlesinger's father Richard, a stockbroker, had come to England in the 1880s from Frankfurt.

After St Edmund's School, Hindhead and Uppingham School (where his father had also been), Schlesinger enlisted in the British Army during World War II. While serving with the Royal Engineers, he made films on the war's front line. He also entertained his fellow troops by performing magic tricks. After his tour of duty, he continued making short films and acted in stage productions while studying at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was involved in the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

Career

Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Vise. He began his directorial career in 1956 with the short documentary Sunday in the Park about London's Hyde Park. In 1958, Schlesinger created a documentary on Benjamin Britten and the Aldeburgh Festival for the BBC's Monitor TV programme, including rehearsals of the children's opera Noye's Fludde featuring a young Michael Crawford. In 1959, Schlesinger was credited as exterior or second unit director on 23 episodes of the TV series The Four Just Men and four 30-minute episodes of the series Danger Man. He also appeared in Col March of Scotland Yard as "Dutch cook" in "Death and the Other Monkey" 1956.

By the 1960s, he had virtually given up acting to concentrate on a directing career, and another of his earlier directorial efforts, the British Transport Films' documentary Terminus (1961), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction films, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962. His third feature film, Darling (1965), tartly described the modern way of life in London and was one of the first films about 'swinging London'. Schlesinger's next film was the period drama Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's popular novel accentuated by beautiful English country locations. Both films (and Billy Liar) featured Julie Christie as the female lead.

Schlesinger's next film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), was internationally acclaimed. A story of two hustlers living on the fringe in the bad side of New York City, it was Schlesinger's first film shot in the US, and it won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. The film was one of the earliest mainstream American films to deal explicitly with homosexual relationships, and is considered a groundbreaking work of queer cinema. During the 1970s, he made an array of films that were mainly about loners, losers and people outside the mainstream world, such as Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976) and Yanks (1979). Later, came the major box office and critical failure of Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), followed by films that attracted mixed responses from the public, and low returns, although The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) made money and Pacific Heights (1990) was a box-office hit. In Britain, he did better with films like Madame Sousatzka (1988) and Cold Comfort Farm (1995). Other later works include plays for television An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991), both with scripts by Alan Bennett, The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000).

Schlesinger directed on stage Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London's Piccadilly Theatre. From 1973, he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre, where he produced George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House (1975). He directed several operas, including Les contes d'Hoffmann (1980) and Der Rosenkavalier (1984), both at Covent Garden.

Schlesinger directed a party political broadcast for the Conservative Party in the general election of 1992, which featured Prime Minister John Major returning to Brixton in south London, thus highlighting Major's humble background, something atypical for a Conservative politician at that time. Schlesinger said he had voted for all three main political parties in the UK at one time or another.

Later life and death

In 1991, Schlesinger made a brief return to acting, portraying the gay character 'Derek' in the TV adaptation of The Lost Language of Cranes for the BBC. Schlesinger had himself come out during the making of Midnight Cowboy.

Schlesinger was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to film. Maintaining a flat in London and house at Palm Springs, California Schlesinger had a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars dedicated to him in January 2003, which was his final public appearance.

Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, before suffering a stroke on New Year's Day 2001, which substantially diminished his faculties. He died at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs on the morning of 25 July 2003, at the age of 77.

Schlesinger was survived by his partner of over 30 years, photographer Michael Childers. A memorial service was held on 30 September 2003. He was cremated, with most of his ashes interred next to his parents, and the remainder left to be interred with Childers.

Filmography

Documentary film

• Israel: A Right to Live (1967)

Documentary short

TV movies

• Separate Tables (1983)
• An Englishman Abroad (1983)
• Cold Comfort Farm (1995)
• The Tale of Sweeney Todd (1998)

Awards and honours

He was twice nominated for the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion, and was recipient of the Directors Guild of Great Britain's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1970, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to film. In 1981, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Attenborough its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his life's work. In 2002 he was made a BAFTA Fellow.

Academy Awards

BAFTA Awards

Golden Globe Awards