PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Lindsay Anderson, who achieved equal distinction for his work in cinema and in theatre, was born in Bangalore while the Raj still flourished. Educated at Cheltenham College, Wadham College, Oxford (where he was a Classics scholar) and in the King's Royal Rifle Corps (three years wartime service), he was impeccably a son of the Empire. As both film director and theatre director, he won an international reputation. His output of films was not large, but each of them, from such early documentaries as Thursday's Children (co-directed with Guy Brenton and awarded the Hollywood Short Subject Oscar in 1953) and Everyday Except Christmas (Venice Festival Grand Prix, 1957) to his feature films, This Sporting Life, If...(Cannes Festival Grand Prix 1969), O Lucky Man!, Britannia Hospital and his last, The Whales of August, has been accorded lasting acclaim. His career in the theatre, equally notable, started at the Royal Court in the golden age of British theatrical renaissance in the late fifties. He was responsible for the premiere productions in this country of a number of plays now standard in the modern repertoire: The Long and The Short and The Tall, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, Billy Liar, Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers and Andorra and Ben Travers' The Bed Before Yesterday. His collaboration with David Storey, which began with the film of This Sporting Life, produced a succession of memorable productions, from In Celebration in 1969, through Home, The Changing Room and Early Days to his last stage production, Stages in 1992. Anderson's work in television, though little, was equally distinguished and uncompromising. His first television production (of Alan Bennett's The Old Crowd, 1979) provoked scandal in the national press and was attacked by Lady Gaitskell in The Guardian for squandering national resources. Glory! Glory! (1989) was a satire on television evangelists. His last television work was a documentary self-portrait, Is That All There Is? shown after his death in August 1994. Before he became established as a director, Lindsay Anderson contributed frequently to papers like The Times, The Observer and the New Statesman. His writing about films in the iconoclastic review Sequence (of which he was also an editor), and the essays he wrote in the context of the Free Cinema movement in the late fifties established him as a critic of trenchant authority. His approach, he said, was 'traditional' - but not conservative. He ascribed the irritant quality of his personality to the fact that his blood, though not his accent, was Scottish.
