David Lean was brought up by a Quaker mother who strongly disapproved of the cinema and a father who expected him to follow his career as an accountant. Lean's passion for the medium was not to be denied however, and in the mid-1920s he joined Gaumont Films, originally as a tea-boy, and then became an editor at a time when sound films were beginning to be made.Lean's work as an editor was so highly valued that by the mid-1930s he was considered pre-eminent in his field. After editing the groundbreaking film version of Shaw's Pygmalion (1938), he edited and co-directed Major Barbara (1941), another Shaw adaptation, which became one of the country's most successful movies of the 1940s.
Noel Coward was so impressed by Lean that he employed him as technical director of the wartime classic In Which We Serve (1943), and the collaboration with Coward continued triumphantly with This Happy Breed (1944) and Blithe Spirit (1945).
A third Coward play, Brief Encounter (1945), the classic story of a self-denying affair between 2 honourable middle-class characters, played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, earned Lean an Academy Award (Oscar) nomination.
For many people, Lean's 1940s adaptations of 2 Dickens novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), represent the definitive cinema versions of these immortal works, with their evocative, magical opening sequences and moments of heart-stopping terror. However, when Lean moved into colour with his Japanese prisoner-of-war classic, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), starring Alec Guiness, he reached an even greater public and won an Academy Award for Best Director. In 1962, he repeated the achievement with Lawrence of Arabia, described as the definitive dramatic film epic of its generation.
Despite these triumphs, some critics claimed to discern a lack of personal vision in Lean's visually superb, technically flawless films. His next offering, an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel of the Russian Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1965), received mixed reviews even though impressive sales figures demonstrated its success with the general public.
In 1970, Ryan's Daughter, scripted by Robert Bolt and starring John Mills and Robert Mitchum, was sharply criticised for its slow pace and excessive length. Lean made no more films for 14 years, but in 1984 his version of E M Forster's novel, A Passage to India, was enthusiastically received by critics and public alike. In that year, Lean was awarded a knighthood and in 1990 he received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement award, the first non-American to do so.
