RIP Richard Attenborough
Gandhi was the first movie I watched in the cinema. It started my love affair with cinema, and that is how I will always remember Richard Attenborough.
Below is an extract from an essay by Max Winter and a video by Nelson Carvajal from Press Play which looks back at Richard Attenborough's career as an actor and director.
The actor and director whom most would know either for his turn in Jurassic Park or for directing vast films like Gandhi or Chaplin had other exploits up his sleeve as well: an early film role was Pinkie in Brighton Rock, a movie about violence and terror on the English seaside birthed from the fog-swept, crime-obsessed mind of Graham Greene.
What’s most evident, in watching Attenborough's films and considering his career, is a sense of embodiment, of polymathy. On the most basic level, this could mean he was able to act and direct with equal ability. To play Pinkie as a young man and then play Santa Claus (in Miracle on 34th Street) or a deranged scientist late in life suggests, at the very least, range, but it also indicates that he possessed the kind of intelligence invaluable to successful actors: the ability to imagine someone you have never met, and then someone else, and then someone else, and never let anyone see the workings of your imagination.
RIP Richard Attenborough, 1923-2014.