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David Lean: A Biography

Name: David Lean: A Biography
Author: Kevin Brownlow
ISBN: 9781466832374

by Kevin Brownlow

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Overview

The life and its biographer provide a landmark work on the cinema. Emerging from a childhood of nearly Dickensian darkness, David Lean found his great success as a director of the appropriately titled Great Expectations.

There followed his legendary black-and-white films of the 1940s and his four-film movie collaboration with Noel Coward. Lean's 1955 film Summertime took him from England to the world of international moviemaking and the stunning series of spectacular color epics that would gain for his work twenty-seven Academy Awards and fifty-six Academy Award nominations. All are classics, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India.

Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry.

One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity.

The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean's color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.

About the Author, Kevin Brownlow

Kevin Brownlow, who lives in London, is a historian of silent films, which he began collecting at the age of eleven. He has written about them in The Parade's Gone By...; The War, the West, and the Wilderness; Behind the Mask of Innocence; Hollywood: The Pioneers; and Napolean: Abel Gance's Classic Film, which recounted his acclaimed reconstruction of that famous masterpiece. As a filmmaker, he has made two features with Andrew Mollo--It Happened Here and Winstanley--and several television documentaries with David Gill, including the thirteen-part series Hollywood, first shown in 1980, and more recently Unknown Chaplin, Buster KEaton: A Hard Art to Follow, and Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius.

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Editorials

Gavin Lambert

Reading the book is an act of total emersion: you emerge saturated with all you could possibly want to know about the director's personal and professional life.
—Los Angeles Times