Attenborough enjoyed a long career as a screen actor and star, producer and then director of major films. He was also a member of the British establishment, at various times President of RADA and of BAFTA and Chair at the British Film Institute and Channel Four. He was involved in numerous charities: involved in the Boards of the Chelsea Football Club and the short-lived Capital Radio: he became a Life Peer in 1993. He won many film awards including from the Hollywood Academy, The British Academy Film Awards and the US-based Golden Globe Awards. His early films made him a popular star and many of his films as producer and director were successful at the box office. This makes him representative in a number of ways of the British Film Industry from the 1940s to the 2010s; one can argue that he represents the dominant values and interests there, as his films were almost always mainstream entertainment.

Attenborough’s family background was important. His father worked was an academic who became Principal of University College Leicester. and both parents were supporters of the Labour Party. His mother was on a Committee for Spanish Refugees from the Civil War and the family provided a home for two Jewish refugees from the Third Reich during World War II. Attenborough had two younger brothers; next to him was David who has become even more famous as a broadcaster and champion for  the environmental movement. Attenborough had an early interested in dramatics and  he won a scholarship to RADA. There he met Sheila Sim who he married at the end of the war; her support as wife and mother is an important contribution to his achievements. Both had early leading roles in theatre productions, and they were in the original cast of the famously long-running The Mousetrap.

In 1942 Attenborough had a small but significant role in the wartime naval drama In Which We Serve. He played a vulnerable rating who deserts his post; the vulnerability was to be a continuing characteristic in subsequent film roles.  Attenborough served in the RAF and was recruited to the Royal Air Force Film Productions and appeared in Journey Together  (1945), directed by John Boulting; a production on which he met Edward G. Robinson who became a friend and something of  a mentor.  He then volunteered for the RAF Film Unit; he suffered ear damage on flights but also learnt to operate the specialised camera used to record the results of bombing raids.

He made a couple of poor quality film dramas in the war years but, following the war, he started an association with the Boulting Brothers. This led to his appearing in their adaptation from the Grahame Greene novel Brighton Rock; Attenborough had already won praise appearing in a stage version. This really is an outstanding British film and the role of Pinky, a psychotic gangster involved in protection rackets, is likely his best ever performance on film. Pinky is a juvenile and Attenborough retained a youthful appearance for years, often appearing as younger than his actual age. But the Pinky role also bought out a malevolence just under the service which reappeared later in some of the characters that he played.

The 1950s saw Attenborough as a young popular star, enjoying guest appearances and celebrity. The film roles varied considerably; some like Fathers Doing Fine (1952) are stagy and not really successful. other, like Morning Departure (1950) or The Ship That Died of Shame (1955) are very well done. He was a friend of John Mills; they both appeared as ‘names above the title’ and frequently played in naval or army dramas.

Among the really successful films of the decade were the Boulting Brothers’ satires, Private Progress (1956) and I’m All Right Jack (1959). In these Attenborough played a spiv character, a type that he evolved in this period. The vulnerability lessened or disappeared and he projected a suave deceptive style. The Boulting Brothers films in the 1940s had the focus on ordinary working people common in the war years. Their 1950s films started to display almost a contempt for this class. I’m All Right Jack is a especially reactionary example, not just with the stereotype of union organiser played by Peter Sellers, but the tendency to portray groups of workers as unthinking and easily manipulated mobs.

Attenborough himself expressed some dissatisfaction with the roles and films in the 1950s. In the late 1950s he formed Beaver Films with his friend Bryan Forbes. Forbes wrote screenplays and directed; Attenborough acted as Producer.  Their first production was The Angry Silence (1960), a story from actor Michael Craig and directed by Guy Green. Green was  a member of Allied Film Makers, with whom Beaver worked. The film is even worse than I’m All Right Jack in its depiction of Trade Unions and their members. The acquisitiveness in the earlier film is here replaced by subversion, directed at the unnamed Communist Party of Great Britain. Attenborough later justified the film’s attack on the grounds of the individual against the mob; a stance that showed that whilst he followed his parents in supporting the Labour Party he was to the right of that organisation. In 1981 he supported the defection of the group known as ‘the gang of four’.

The three subsequent films made by Beaver definitely improved in content. The L-Shaped Room (1962) is a fine production and Séance on a Wet Afternoon is also well done; with a fine performance by Attenborough himself with real vulnerabilities in the character. The Great Escape (1963) was a Hollywood version of World War II POW films. It’s success laid the way for Attenborough to appear frequently in Hollywood productions.  Not brilliant, like the over-long The Sand Pebbles (1966), they were pretty successful at the Box Office. The British films, as was increasingly the case as the 1960s moved into the 1970s, were less successful and even poorer quality. The Last Grenade (1970), in which Attenborough has  military role, is likely the worse.  But Attenborough bounced back with one of his fine performance in 10 Rillington Place (1971). Based on the actual serial killer John Christie and the wrongfully executed Timothy Evans, the film had a strong anti-capital punishment message, which appealed to Attenborough. His Christie, mild-mannered and softly spoken, is in the same class as his earlier but vastly different Pinky.

Already experienced as a Producer Attenborough now had his opportunity to direct. This was a film version of the stage success Oh, What a Lovely War  (1969). Whilst it lacked the bite of the Littlewood original Workshop Production it was extremely well made and well received. Aspects already apparent was Attenborough’s skill in finding excellent craft people and in his attention to historical detail. He also tended to cast star actors, including in cameos; this was important in raising finance for productions. The historical/biopic was to be the major strand in his subsequent film work. Some of these films had a Ho0llywood connection, as with Young Winston (1972). This film, like subsequent productions, was epic, long and episodic. Attenborough was to handle these aspects more successfully in later films. So, A Bridge Too Far (1977), was more successful, both as a film and at the box office. It did have problems with historical accuracy and handling the contradictions between entertainment and representing history.

The most successful was his subsequent biopic, Gandhi (1982). This was the result of a 20 year odyssey recorded in his book In Search of Gandhi (1982). The book is an interesting study in the travails of finding finance for productions, especially when the proposed film is on an epic scale; some of Attenborough film roles in the period were mainly to provide income for the costs of developing the project. Finally, the film was a joint production between the British Goldcrest and the National Film Development Corporation of India. It was filmed mainly in India and was epic both in the scale of the production and the on-screen final film. It won eight Academy Awards in 1983 and remains Attenborough’s most celebrated production .

He did make a number of other screen appearances. Probably the best was as General Outram in Satyajit Ray’s masterful The Chess Players (1977). A later famous example being almost himself in Jurassic Park (1993). He also directed several more movies. One of these was Cry Freedom (1987), an adaptation of two books by Donald Woods: one about the Black Consciousness Leader Steve Biko: the other about how Woods and his family fled Apartheid South Africa because of state repression. This film demonstrated the problems of combining entertainment and a message, half the film is taken up with the escape of the Woods’ family, and the portrait of Biko and of Black Consciousness is not really adequate.

Attenborough’s biopic of Chaplin (1992) is more successful  though it did not do that well at the box office. And then what is one of his best biopics, Shadowlands (1993) which dramatises the relationship between the successful writer on spiritual matters, C. S. Lewis and the US poet Joy Gresham. His last film as director was Closing the Ring (2007). Appropriately, given how large it looms in his career, the film includes a story from that World War II but then ties it to two stories in later decades. The film’s central setting is in the USA but carries over into occupied north of  Ireland. The settings do not really engage and again a British film-maker fails to really address the contradictions of the occupation in Ireland. There was one unmade epic, a biopic of the British radical Thomas Paine. This was to be based on a script by Trevor Griffiths, but even Attenborough could not raise the funding. The script was published as These are the Times (2005). It has been performed as a stage play and in a two part adaptation on BBC Radio 4.

Attenborough leaves a legacy of a long acting career with some outstanding performances; and a collection of notable awards from many quarters. He also leaves some fine movies which he either produced or produced and directed. It is clear from his many roles, both on film and in other areas, that he was adept at handling and focussing on very different activities. He was a fine organiser, which comes out in his production work. He was obviously adept at negotiating with wide range of people and organisations. He worked well, especially with actors which was his forte; but he also worked well and frequently acknowledged the skills of craft and technical people. He would seem an auteur from his focus on recurring themes in films, both as an actor and as a director. But whilst there are recognisable tropes in his films they tend to follow mainstream conventions and owe much to the technical staff involved.

His overall film work comes across as conservative and traditional in the sense of values. He clearly espoused liberal values, both in Britain and abroad. However, his view of empire in particular saw it as full of unfortunate aberrations rather than as its actual brutal system of exploitation. The policies of, say a Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party, would seem extremist to him. As a film-maker he was wedded to film as entertainment. The main criteria here is the box office; with reviews and awards less important. This sees film as exchange value dependent on box office numbers. There are different approaches where film is much more about use values: engagement, information even challenges. The Chess Players is an example of one such. Whilst Attenborough greatly admired Satyajit Ray he was not tempted to follow his form of film.

He left a sort of memoir, Entirely Up to You Darling (2008) which he authored with Diana Hawkins, a close confidante who worked especially on publicity for many of this films. And there is a dossier of Richard Attenborough, based mainly on interviews with him, by David Robinson (1992). Wikipedia has biographical pages and pages on his films; as usual with helpful links.

His film work is varied but full of fascinating dramas. I shall be posting reviews on all his theatrically released films on Talking Pictures.