British stage and film director, born in Bangalore, SC India. He studied at Oxford, made short documentary films during the 1950s, and won an Oscar for Thursday's Children (1955). He was a leading proponent of the Free Cinema critical movement, with its focus on working-class themes. He joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1957. His first feature film was This Sporting Life (1963), followed by If.... (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), Britannia Hospital (1982), and The Whales of August (1987). He also acted cameo parts on film.
Lindsay Gordon Anderson (April 17, 1923 - August 30, 1994), was an English film and documentary director.
Career
Before going into film-making, Anderson was a prominent film critic writing for Sequence magazine (1947-52), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert, and later for the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. As seen in his writings, another major influence was Humphrey Jennings, the great wartime documentary film maker.
Following a series of screenings which he organized at the National Film Theatre of independently-produced short films by himself, Karel Reisz and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late-1950s.
These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960's with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life, Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. One of Anderson's early short films, Thursday's Child, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. resulting in Anderson's film Foreign Skies: Wham!
Anderson is best remembered internationally for his "Mick Travis" trilogy of feature films, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as Travis: If..., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.
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