Anderson, Lindsay (1923-1994), was a British film, television, and theater director. Anderson was one of the most influential figures of the British cinema between the early 1960’s and the late 1980’s. His films were notable for their witty, barbed attacks on what he saw as the smugness of British society and its obsession with social class.
Lindsay Gordon Anderson was born on April 17, 1923, in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India, the son of a British officer in the Indian Army. He was educated at Cheltenham College, an English public (independent) school, and at Wadham College, Oxford University. He became a film critic in his 20’s, and from 1947 to 1951 he edited the cinema magazine Sequence. During the 1950’s, Anderson made several short documentary films, including Thursday’s Children (1954) and Every Day Except Christmas (1957). Thursday’s Children, about a school for deaf children, won the 1954 Academy Award as best short subject.
In 1957, Anderson joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where he directed such plays as John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959). Anderson was associated with the English playwright and novelist David Storey, directing many of Storey’s stage plays and screenplays. In 1963, he adapted one of Storey’s novels in his first feature film, This Sporting Life, the tale of a coal miner who becomes a Rugby League player. Anderson’s next film, If… (1968), was the story of a rebellion among the pupils in a public school. These two powerful films earned Anderson an international reputation.
Anderson’s other films include O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982), both portraying the United Kingdom as a nation taking no heed of its own imminent social destruction. Anderson also made About John Ford (1981), his personal homage to the American film director John Ford, and Whales of August (1987), a film about how old people see life. Anderson also acted in several films. He died on Aug. 30, 1994.
