The schoolboy called a dud became Britain's only double Best Director winner
David Lean left school at 18 branded a dud and went to work in his father's accountancy firm. A Brownie camera and nightly cinema trips pulled him into a studio as a teaboy. He went on to win two directing Oscars, first for Lawrence of Arabia's predecessor, The Bridge on the River Kwai, then for Lawrence itself.
Lean was born in South Croydon on 25 March 1908 to Quaker parents and schooled at Leighton Park in Reading. An uncle gave him a Brownie box camera at ten, an unusually grown-up present then, and developing his own film became his passion. His father walked out on the family in 1923. Bored as an accountancy apprentice, he took an aunt's advice to find work he enjoyed and talked Gaumont Studios into a month's unpaid trial in 1927.
He rose from teaboy to clapperboy to third assistant director, then cut newsreels and, by 1942, more than two dozen features, including Pygmalion and 49th Parallel. The editing room shaped his eye. His directing debut, In Which We Serve (1942), was co-directed with Noel Coward, and their partnership produced Brief Encounter, a restrained tale of suburban lovers that shared the top prize at Cannes in 1946 and earned his first Oscar nominations.
Two Dickens films followed, both starring Alec Guinness, whom Lean saw as his lucky charm. Guinness's Fagin in Oliver Twist provoked a riot at a 1949 Berlin screening and condemnation in New York; Lean said he was surprised by the charge of antisemitism, and the US release was held back until 1951 after eight minutes were cut. Summertime, shot entirely in Venice with Katharine Hepburn, remained his personal favourite.
From 1957 his films grew fewer and vaster. River Kwai, about prisoners forced to build a railway bridge in Burma, took seven Oscars. Lawrence of Arabia, written by Robert Bolt, made Peter O'Toole a star and gave Maurice Jarre his first Oscar. Doctor Zhivago, his biggest earner, spun off the hit song Somewhere My Love. After critics mauled Ryan's Daughter in 1970, Lean stopped directing for fourteen years, returning only for A Passage to India in 1984.
Source: David Lean
