Mike Leigh's films are like no one else's. His subject matter typically explores contemporary British lower middle-class life in gloomy but comic terms, often resulting in the blackest of black comedy. The fact that his films are instantly recognisable is due not least to Leigh's unique working methods, which do not rely on a written script but involve endless improvisation with a carefully prepared cast before any shooting begins.Leigh was born in the industrial town of Salford, Lancashire, in 1943. His first film, Bleak Moments, appeared in 1971, but it was with his television plays that he began to achieve widespread recognition. In 1976, he devised and directed Nuts in May, followed in 1977 by Abigail's Party. Many of Britain's finest actors have been associated with Leigh's plays, notably his wife Alison Steadman, whose performance as Beverly in Abigail's Party has become a byword for comic grotesquerie. Actors Leigh has worked with include Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Antony Sher, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Brenda Blethyn and Jane Horrocks.
Working with actors to produce characters and a script from months of improvisations and rehearsals, Leigh starts every project from scratch. He describes making a film as an "exploration into what we feel" and is not interested in films that are conclusive or prescriptive, let alone propagandist. His films tend to ask questions, either rationally or emotionally, rather than providing answers. "What I do," he says, "is work very thoroughly and get the actors involved from the word go to create a world that really does exist, whether we point a camera at it or not". The results are often extraordinary: comic, poignant, above all totally individual.
Two of Mike Leigh's films, Naked (1993) and Secrets and Lies (1996), received Best Director awards at Cannes Film Festival. In Naked, the central character is a study in angry failure, a broken man who still manages to be charismatic and almost sympathetic. In Secrets and Lies, an adopted black girl seeking her birth mother stumbles into a muddled, unhappy white family, and acts as a catalyst to their repressed misery. The underlying theme of Leigh's work, as he sees it himself, is a universal need for family and roots.
In his recent venture, Topsy Turvey (1999), Leigh makes an uncharacteristic excursion from his usual stamping ground into Victorian London, describing the lives of the comic opera masters, W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and the making of their The Mikado in 1885. Many critics have claimed that Leigh's ability to involve his characters in "a world that really does exist" has triumphed over the problems of mounting his film in the comparatively distant past. "What you take away from this movie," one writes, "is the sensation of having been in the theatre itself and subject to its unreliable but addictive glamour".
