lewis gilbert

Born on March 6, 1920, in the London borough of Hackney, before it was fashionable among hipsters, when it was populated by underprivileged people, show business runs through Lewis Gilbert’s veins, as he comes from a family of artists from the music hall. For this reason he spent his childhood on trains, accompanying his parents from town to town, which prevented him from conventional training at school.

At the age of five, he was already appearing on stage, but at seven he had to face the death of his father from tuberculosis. In need of money, her mother began to introduce her to castings, for which she ended up participating in various theatrical productions. At the age of 14 she made her film debut as an extra, in Dick Turpin , shortly before accompanying Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in the dramatic comedy The Divorce of Miss X.

His performances drew praise, and offers poured in. But he had decided that he was more attracted to filmmaking, so he preferred to become an assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock himself , in Jamaica Inn . With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the film department of the Royal Air Force, a period during which he shot a lot of documentary material, and ended up as an assistant to the American director William Keighley , who taught him the tricks of the trade.

After the war, Lewis Gilbert spent a season as a documentary filmmaker working for Gaumont’s British division. But he immediately turned to dramatic cinema with The Little Ballerina , his debut, a tale of the ambitions of an aspiring dance figure. He immediately succeeded with a series of true stories that occurred during the war years, such as Reach for the Sky , Sink the Bismarck! or Secret Agent SZ . He also demonstrated his ability to reconstruct past conflicts with the ground-breaking Mutiny on the Defiant , with Alec Guinness , set during the French Revolution.

Married to Gilda Taller, a visit to his wife’s hairdresser would change his professional journey. While he was taking care of her, he had an actress next to him who told him that she was representing a play that she couldn’t stop watching. It was Bill Naughton ‘s Alfie , centered on an unrepentant womanizer who rethinks his existence when one of his ‘girlfriends’ leaves him for a younger man. When the Gilbert couple left the theater after a performance, he was clear about what his new project was going to be.

“I got the financing because the movie cost less than what Paramount executives normally spend on cigarettes,” the filmmaker used to recall. Thanks to this circumstance, he was not given a star, so he was able to give his first starring role to a promising young man named Michael Caine . The actor embroidered both the comic part of the beginning, and the bitter part of the second section. Despite his lack of scruples, he won over the respectable by speaking directly to him. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and while it garnered five Oscar nominations, including in the Best Picture category, it came up empty.

The central character of Educating Rita , where Julie Walters wants to get out of poverty by resuming her studies, will also be forced to undergo a radical change, with the help of a teacher, who will once again be Michael Caine . It has elements in common with her other great film, Shirley Valentine , where a jaded housewife ( Pauline Collins , also chatting to the camera), drops everything to spend a season in the Greek islands.

Sometimes luck was not on Lewis Gilbert’s side, who was recruited for the musical Oliver! , but as the project was delayed, he ended up resigning. Years later, Paramount offered him The Godfather , and although he was about to give the first clapperboard, some problems made him leave. At the height of his career, he was contacted by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. They wanted him to shoot a James Bond film for them, which he flatly refused. They insisted so much that he not only directed You Only Live Twice , with Sean Connery , in 1967, but he would return to the saga two more times in the Roger Moore era , with The Spy Who Loved Me andMoonraker .

He remained active until an advanced age, since his latest works, the horror film Bewitched , and the tragicomedy Before You Go , date from 1995 and 2002. None of them lives up to his seniority. Closely attached for more than five decades to his wife, the aforementioned Workshop, until his death in 2005, Lewis Gilbert only had one son.