He was a consistent force for good at the club, even in dark times. Along with his naturalist brother David, Lord Attenborough was one of Britain's best-known screen celebrities.
He was hailed for his chilling portrayal of teenage hoodlum and murderer Pinkie in Brighton Rock. On stage he was a member of the original cast of Agatha Christie's long-running whodunnit, The Mousetrap. In the s, he was part of a star-studded cast in The Great Escape. His greatest achievement as a director was the epic Gandhi, which collected eight Oscars. Later in his acting life he starred in Jurassic Park in , as the park's billionaire creator John Hammond.
Born in Cambridge in , he started acting at the age of just 12, making his professional stage debut aged He was appointed a CBE in and knighted nine years later in , before being made a life peer in He married his wife, actress Sheila Sim, in His son Michael was born in , followed by two daughters, Jane and Charlotte.
Michael is a theatre director and former artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London, and Charlotte is an actress. He would continue to play teenagers into his late 20s.
Although he had not changed much physically since Pinkie on stage in Brighton Rock four years previously, he brought more maturity to his film performance. However, it was pushing it a bit to accept the year-old Attenborough in the title role of The Guinea Pig , a year-old working-class scholarship boy at a posh public school, particularly as his wife Sheila played the house mistress. This was followed by another well-meaning social reform melodrama, Boys in Brown , in which "bad 'uns" Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde were Borstal boys.
Meanwhile, Attenborough reprised his cowardly sailor role of In Which We Serve in the submarine drama, Morning Departure as Stoker Snipe, who cracks under pressure.
If John Mills represented the stiff-upper lip school, then Attenborough often had a quivering lower lip. I needed that. In , Sheila and Richard as Detective Sergeant Trotter led the first cast of a play which was to became a theatrical phenomenon.
They stayed two years at the Ambassadors with The Mousetrap, of which its author Agatha Christie prophesied that "we should get a nice little run out of it". The Attenboroughs were still around to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the whodunnit's run. In the mids, Attenborough reunited with the Boulting brothers in a series of satirical comedies attacking some of Britain's institutions. Attenborough, now having put on more weight, was a louche figure in all of them.
In Private's Progress , on the army, he was a scrounger; in Brothers in Law , on the legal profession, a smarmy barrister; and in I'm All Right Jack , on management and unions, he was Sydney de Vere Cox, a shady munitions manufacturer.
His first film as producer was The Angry Silence, an anti-trades union tract, in which Attenborough was a blackleg and yet a hero. Better was the delightfully piquant heist comedy The League of Gentlemen with a gallery of British ex-army types, including Attenborough in his spiv persona.
Further US movies were The Flight of the Phoenix in which he was an inept navigator whose alcoholism has led to a plane, piloted by James Stewart, to crash in the Sahara desert; in The Sand Pebbles , supporting McQueen again, Attenborough was encouraged to go over the top as a crewman hopelessly in love with a Chinese girl bound for prostitution, and as circus man Albert Blossom in Dr Dolittle These roles were taken on to help finance his long-cherished project, a film on the life of Gandhi.
It was the only film he thought he would direct, but when offered Oh! What a Lovely War, he accepted the challenge gladly. Although the film, with a dazzling all-star cast of British actors, rather softened Joan Littlewood's scabrous stage satire on the first world war, its stylisation and clever seaside-postcard use of the Brighton pavilion and old pier made it Attenborough's most audacious and artistically successful project.
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Spouse: Sheila Sim his death 3 children. Children: Michael Attenborough See more ». Relatives: David Attenborough sibling See more ». Edit Did You Know? Personal Quote: I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose. Trademark: Frequently made films with a moral message or a liberal political perspective See more ».
Nickname: Dickie, Bunter. Star Sign: Virgo.
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