John Schlesinger

John Schlesinger (born February 16, 1926, London, England—died July 25, 2003, Palm Springs, California, U.S.) was an English film director known for a wide variety of sensitively told stories set in his homeland and in the United States.

Early life and work

Schlesinger’s father was a pediatrician, and both of his parents were accomplished musicians who encouraged his interest in the arts. He received a home movie camera as a gift at age 11, and, while serving in the Royal Engineers during World War II, he made films on the war’s front line. He also entertained his fellow troops by performing magic tricks, and after his tour of duty he continued making short films and acted in stage productions while studying at the University of Oxford. He toured the United States, Australia, and New Zealand with theatrical troupes in the early 1950s, and he acted in British theatre, cinema, and television, including roles in the films Oh…Rosalinda! (1955) and The Battle of the River Plate (1956) by the noted filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

In 1957 Schlesinger took a post as a director at BBC TV, for which he made more than 20 documentaries for the programs Tonight and Monitor. When Terminus (1961), the documentary that he made about the bustle of Waterloo Station in London, was honoured with awards by the Venice Film Festival and the British Academy of Film and Theatre Arts, Schlesinger was given the opportunity to direct feature films.

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British films

As part of an emerging New Wave of British social-realist directors that included Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson, Schlesinger brought a documentary approach to the investigation of the complex dynamics of human relationships, particularly those of people in love. His first feature, A Kind of Loving (1962), was a low-key but effective exercise in the “kitchen-sink” school of drama that was grounded in working-class characters, industrial locales in northern England, and naturalistic performances, filmed with gritty cinematography. Alan Bates starred as draughtsman who struggles with the responsibilities of married life after being compelled to marry a pregnant coworker. Even more accomplished was Billy Liar (1963), based on a novel and play by Keith Waterhouse. This often very funny film follows the fortune of a young Yorkshire funeral-home worker (played by Tom Courtenay) who relies on his elaborate fantasy life to escape from the drudgery of his job. Julie Christie, whose early career was much entwined with Schlesinger’s, made her screen debut as the dreamer’s former girlfriend who tries to persuade him to run off to London, where she has escaped the strictures of provincial life. Christie moved to centre stage for Darling (1965), a corrosive portrait of an amoral woman who changes professions (model, actress, countess) as often as she changes lovers. Although some critics found her performance stilted, Christie won an Academy Award for best actress, and Frederic Raphael won the award for his screenplay, while Schlesinger was nominated for best director and the film for best picture.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), based on Thomas Hardy’s epic novel of the same name, was Schlesinger’s big-budget payoff for the success of Darling. It was made for MGM’s British division and cast Christie as the beleaguered heroine and Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp as the trio of men who try to worship, abase, or simply possess her. Scripted by Raphael and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, the film was one of Schlesinger’s most fully realized projects.

Films of the late 1960s and ’70s

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Schlesinger’s first Hollywood motion picture, Midnight Cowboy (1969), was wildly successful. Waldo Salt adapted James Leo Herlihy’s novel about a pair of small-time hustlers in New York—gimpy Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) and Texas transplant Joe Buck (Jon Voight)—who unexpectedly bond in the course of living their marginal existences. Schlesinger’s gritty depiction of the urban underbelly was (for the time) so shockingly raw that the film was originally assigned an X rating, though it was soon reevaluated and given an R, permitting a broader audience to see it. Critics swooned. Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for best picture; Schlesinger won the award for best director; Salt won for best screenplay; and Voight and Hoffman were both nominated for best actor.

Midnight Cowboy was hailed for its unvarnished realistic view of American life and locales. Critics noted that the British-born Schlesinger observed American urban life with the eye of an interested observer and was able to capture details often taken for granted by American directors. Schlesinger, who was openly gay, also observed that Midnight Cowboy was the first commercial film that did not treat homosexuality as “hysterical [or] funny.” In his follow-up film, Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Schlesinger again dealt with the theme of homosexuality sympathetically as he focused on a trio of Londoners (Finch, Glenda Jackson, and Murray Head) who become involved in a bisexual romantic triangle. Schlesinger, Finch, Jackson, and scenarist Penelope Gilliatt were all nominated for Academy Awards.

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After directing a segment on the marathon in Visions of Eight (1973), a documentary on the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Schlesinger returned to the United States to film Day of the Locust (1975), based on Nathanael West’s novel about the savagery lurking behind the facade of the Hollywood dream machine. Despite a strong cast that included Burgess Meredith, Karen Black, Donald Sutherland, and Geraldine Page, the film, in the eyes of many critics, strained unsuccessfully to distill West’s dark humour.

After the limited commercial success of Sunday Bloody Sunday and Day of the Locust, Schlesinger turned to William Goldman to adapt his own best-selling espionage novel for the director’s next project, Marathon Man (1976). In that compelling thriller, Hoffman played a Jewish graduate student who by degrees finds himself matching wits with a surpassingly evil Nazi-in-hiding (Laurence Olivier, in an Academy Award-nominated performance) who has slain the student’s brother, a rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative (Roy Scheider).

Marathon Man would be Schlesinger’s last box-office triumph for many years. Yanks (1979) was a melodramatic World War II romance set in England, with Richard Gere and Lisa Eichhorn as lovers, whereas Honky Tonk Freeway (1981) was a broad satire of American culture. Better received were a pair of made-for-television films that featured Bates: An Englishman Abroad and Separate Tables (both 1983). The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), the account of two young California men (Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn) who sell government secrets to the Russians, failed to attract audiences when it was released, but its reputation increased over the years. The little-seen The Believers (1987), a ghoulish contemporary horror story, followed. Schlesinger then received his best reviews in years for Madame Sousatzka (1988), an indelible character sketch of a quirky London piano teacher (Shirley MacLaine) who helps her gifted 15-year-old Indian student (Navin Chowdhry) realize his full potential.

Films of the 1990s and final work

Seemingly an attempt to gain a wider audience, the thriller Pacific Heights (1990) featured Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine as a young married couple who are increasingly menaced by the renter (Michael Keaton) who lives in the other half of their San Francisco house. Schlesinger’s next two films dealt with Cold War themes: A Question of Attribution (1992), made for BBC TV, concerned Anthony Blunt (James Fox), the real-life British art historian who was revealed to have been a Soviet spy; The Innocent (1993) focused on the internecine deception between a British (Anthony Hopkins) and an American (Campbell Scott) intelligence agent in Berlin. Considerably lighter in tone was Cold Comfort Farm (1995). Made for British television, it brought to the screen the 1932 novel by Stella Gibbons about a group of eccentrics on a foreboding farm whose lives are dramatically reordered when a young recently orphaned relative (Kate Beckinsale) comes to visit. Schlesinger’s final films were the intense drama Eye for an Eye (1996), about a revenge-driven mother (Sally Field) whose daughter was the victim of rape, and The Next Best Thing (2000), in which Madonna played a yoga instructor who decides to have a baby with her gay best friend (Rupert Everett).

Schlesinger continued to work in the theatre throughout his career. He had particularly notable success with his Royal Shakespeare Company production of Timon of Athens (1965), and in 1973—three years after he had been made a Commander of the British Empire—Schlesinger was named associate director of the National Theatre (now Royal National Theatre). He was especially adept at directing operas, and he even directed a music video for Paul McCartney. Schlesinger also maintained that the best directors are also good actors, and he acted occasionally until the late 1990s, appearing in such films as The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) and The Twilight of the Golds (1996). He suffered a debilitating stroke in 2000 and died of its complications three years later. Although the films of his later career were less uniformly brilliant than those early films with which he made his reputation, Schlesinger left an enviable body of work.