Considered one of the most influential and gifted figures of British Cinema, Lindsay Gordon Anderson (April 17, 1923 — August 30, 1994) was a motion picture director, theatrical producer, author and actor. He was born in Bangalore, India, the son of a British Army Major General. Educated at Cheltenham College and University of Oxford, he served in the British Army during World War II.
A prominent film critic in the 1950s, he co-founded and edited the film journal "Sequence" (1947-1952) and was the leading advocate of the Free Cinema movement (1956-1959) that included his early documentaries O Dreamland (1953), the Academy Award-winning Thursday's Children (1954), and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), a Grand Prix winner at the Venice International Film Festival. Most notably, Anderson was a prominent figure of the cinematic British New Wave (1959-1963), along with directors John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others. This was England's counterpart to France's Nouvelle Vague of cinéma vérité pioneered by directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Having a combative personality and regarded as a perfectionist, Anderson was only able to complete a handful of feature films, most receiving critical acclaim. These include This Sporting Life (1963), The White Bus (1967), Palme d'Or winner If... (1968), the remarkable O Lucky Man! (1973), Britannia Hospital (1982), and The Whales of August (1987).
Anderson was a stage director at London's Royal Court Theatre (1957-1992) and involved with 35 productions over three decades. He occasionally acted, most notably in Chariots of Fire (1981). He wrote the highly regarded biography "About John Ford" in 1983 after decades of meeting with and studying the director. His final work, the autobiographical BBC mockumentary Is That All There Is? (1992), went unseen until two weeks after his death from a heart attack. He is my twelfth cousin twice removed.
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