Working his way up from clapper-boy to editor's apprentice in the 1930s, Lean edited newsreels and then features. His first outing as a director, with Noël Coward, IN WHICH WE SERVE (1942), was a moving study of wartime England that contrasted the duty to fight with the human sacrifice required to win. Lean's next three films came from Coward's pen: THIS HAPPY BREED (1944), the story of a London family from 1919 to 1939; the rousingly entertaining BLITHE SPIRIT (1945); and the quietly effective BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945), about a bored housewife (Celia Johnson) who almost has an affair with a doctor (Trevor Howard). These were followed by faithful adaptations of GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946) and OLIVER TWIST (1948), justly regarded as exemplary translations of Dickens to the screen.
Of his next three films, the semi-documentary BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER (1952), where he returned to the duty/sacrifice thematics of IN WHICH WE SERVE, is most noteworthy. Lean's rollicking version of the stage comedy HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954), the story of a woman's emancipation from her overbearing father, featured the first in a series of strong, independent women characters that would include Lara (DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, 1965), Rosy Ryan (RYAN'S DAUGHTER, 1970), and Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore (A PASSAGE TO INDIA, 1984). SUMMERTIME (1955), about the Venice affair of a lonely American spinster (Katharine Hepburn), saw the emergence of one of Lean's central themes: the journey as a quest for self-knowledge. This theme would provide the narrative backbone for several subsequent films.
Accordingly, the WWII adventure THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) revolves around the self-delusion of Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), leader of the British contingent in a Burmese prisoner-of-war camp. Commercially and critically successful, winning seven Academy Awards including best picture and best director, BRIDGE initiated the cycle of big-budget spectacles that would characterize Lean's later work. It was also the first of two films expressing the director's increasingly jaundiced view of wartime heroics. While BRIDGE presents militarism as an insane but inevitable extension of the strutting male ego, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) investigates the psychology of heroism. Starting with a dashing, if eccentric and enigmatic hero (stunningly played by Peter O'Toole), the film gradually peels away the bravado to reveal the confused shell beneath.
Lean's next two films, also scripted by Robert Bolt, were love stories. The international success of the lushly rendered DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, based on the Boris Pasternak novel, may have encouraged him to accentuate his romantic tendency, which he did with disastrous results in RYAN'S DAUGHTER. Partly due to the poor reception of this film, it would be 14 years before Lean would complete his next picture, a splendid adaptation of E.M. Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA. Returning to the motif of the journey of self-discovery, and sharpening the ambiguities of the source novel, Lean succeeded in restoring the romantic/realist tension which had informed his best work.
Lean devoted a year of preparation to THE BOUNTY in the early 1980s, only to see it made by other hands. He and Bolt then spent years preparing Joseph Conrad's Nostromo for the screen. Lean died shortly before filming was to begin.
At its most resonant, Lean's is an elegant style that questions elegance, using breathtaking cinematic technique to present biting social criticism: thus THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is a wide-screen anti-war statement; A PASSAGE TO INDIA is a sumptuously photographed critique of colonialism; and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is a perfectly made chronicle of human imperfection.
Lean's five wives inlcuded actresses Kay Walsh (1940-48), Ann Todd (1949-57) and Sandra Hotz (1981-4). In 1990 Lean was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He also received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award that year, the first non-American to be so honored.
Nominated for Directing 1946: BRIEF ENCOUNTER
Nominated for Writing (Screenplay) 1946: BRIEF ENCOUNTER (w. Anthony Havelock-Allan & Ronald Neame)
Nominated for Directing 1947: GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Nominated for Writing (Screenplay) 1947: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (w. Anthony Havelock-Allan & Ronald Neame)
Nominated for Directing 1955: SUMMERTIME
Directing 1957: THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
Directing 1962: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Nominated for Directing 1965: DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
Nominated for Directing 1984: A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another medium) 1984: A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Nominated for Film Editing 1984: A PASSAGE TO INDIA
11 nominations, 2 Awards