Richard Attenborough: best movies
To mark the death of much-loved actor, director and producer Richard Attenborough, Laura Tennant picks of his five most memorable films
Much-loved actor, director and producer Richard Attenborough has died, aged 90. Laura Tennant marks his passing with her pick of his five most memorable films
The career of director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough, who has just died aged 90, spans over 70 years of British and international filmmaking. From his very first credited role in Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942), to director’s credits on films starring every famous actor you’ve ever heard of, Attenborough, renowned as a thoroughly good egg in a notoriously cut-throat industry, left an indelible stamp on 20th century film. Here’s our pick of five must-see films
Oh What a Lovely War (1969)
This BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning film adaptation of a stage musical originated by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop takes a blackly satirical look at WW1 through popular songs of the time. Attenborough’s all-star cast of great British acting talent included Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave and Ian Holm.
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
The Seventies were all about assembling Magnificent Seven-style gangs of character actors for feats of wartime derring do – and any film starring Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal, Michael Caine and James Caan in uniform has got our vote. Dirk Bogarde plays a Nazi and our heroes try and fail to take some strategically vital German bridges. Attenborough won three BAFTAs for a film which was not afraid to take a pop at the British establishment.
Gandhi (1982)
Ben Kingsley ventriloquized Gandhi to mesmerizing effect in a sprawling biopic that took Attenborough, a long-term Gandhi obsessive, 20 years to bring to the screen. The Observer’s Philip French called it an ‘honourable, honestly affecting, carefully crafted film’; it won its director two Oscars.
Cry Freedom (1987)
Described by one critic as ‘an implacable work of authority and compassion [...] political cinema at its best’, Cry Freedom stars Denzel Washington as anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko; Kevin Kline is the white journalist who begins to report on his campaign and eventually tells the world the story of his martyrdom at the hands of government troops in 1977.
Shadowlands (1993)
Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins are intensely moving in very British stiff-upper-lipped sort of way as writer and Oxford academic C. S. Lewis and the American poet he unexpectedly falls deeply and irrevocably in love with. Attenborough scooped two BAFTAs and numerous other awards.
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