Son of a quaker family, this English filmmaker started his filming career en 1928 when hew got a job in Gaumont studios. Between 1944 and 1955 he adapted several works from dramatist
Noël Coward, between them
Brief Encounter (1945). Later he directed
Oliver Twist (1948) based on
Charles Dickens' novel. Both movies turn him on the most acclaimed
… More British filmmaker in the postwar era.
On 1955 he made Summertime, his first movie outside the United Kingdom, and on 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai, one of his most acclaimed films (it gave him the first of two Academy Awards he had) and the first of a series of spectacular blockbusters characterized by their epic surrounding and their magnificent narrative rhythm: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which gave him his second Oscar and Doctor Zhivago, who was also a major hit and and gained several nominations and awards. But after the moderately successful Ryan's Daughter (1970) he didn't direct another film until the adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India (1984). He tried later with Nostromo, based on Joseph Conrad's novel, but he wasn't able to finish due to his health.
