Playing the role of Young Stoker in Noel Coward’s World War II naval shipwreck adventure, young Richard “Dicky” Attenborough, 19, played a frightened and doomed sailor. Attenborough’s career was uncertain before the British Ministry of Information made this film as propaganda to rouse wartime support. His career took off after its successful release.
Based on the popular crime novel by Graham Greene, this film catapulted Attenborough into a major filmstardom. He was handsome and vulnerable as Pinkie Brown, a young hoodlum who gets in over his head with gangs and violence. Greene’s anti-hero was realized spiritually and physically by Attenborough, who had acted the part three years earlier on London’s West End stage.
The classic and canonized prison-breakout film featured a brawny Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Attenborough as Barlett “Big X,” the Royal Air Force escape genius who draws out the blueprint for his fellow allied prisoners to dig themselves out of the Nazi prison. This was Attenborough’s first major blockbuster, cementing him as a Hollywood presence. He took advantage of this with later onscreen performances, but especially with his directorial career.
Attenborough returned to serious characters with this documentary-style film about the real-life serial killer John Christie, who murdered eight women in his Notting Hill flat during the 1940s and ’50s. The film chronicles the relationship Christie had with his downstairs neighbors the Evanses. Attenborough is charming and chilling.
This is another World War II drama, this time with Attenborough behind the lens. Near the end of the war, Allied forces embarked on Operation Market Garden, a mission to break through enemy lines in the Netherlands with the largest airborne operation in wartime history. Attenborough directed formidable battle scenes, including dropping 1,000 parachuters from the sky. He directed great actors such as James Caan, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, and Robert Redford. The film’s reception was mixed, and included Attenborough being criticized for glorifying the Allied forces too much and not focusing on their failures enough. Still, this film is considered a classic.
The grandest work of Attenborough’s career, this ambitious biography of Mohandas Gandhi’s brilliant life swept the Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Actor for Ben Kingsley, and Best Director for Attenborough. Attenborough orchestrated the largest crowd scene in film history, with a wide aerial shot of 300,000 extras marching for the recreation of Gandhi’s funeral.
Attenborough followed his “Gandhi” success with a biopic about South African apartheid. Because of political and social turmoil in South Africa during the filming, Attenborough and his film crew — including actors Denzel Washington (Oscar-nominated for his role) and Kevin Kline — shot the movie in Zimbabwe. The story portrays the relationship between journalist Donald Woods and black activist Steven Biko, who was beaten to death by police while in their custody in 1977.
Attenborough aimed to capture a whole world behind an icon, and he achieved this in 1992 with Robert Downey Jr.’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the great silent film star, Charlie Chaplin. The film takes viewers from London to Hollywood, from Chaplin’s movie star success to his love affairs, to his exile by J. Edgar Hoover on accusations of communist sympathies. Chaplin’s actor daughter, Geraldine, played his mother. Attenborough’s film is considered one of the great movie biographies.
The year 1993 was a busy one for Attenborough. He directed “Shadowlands” in England and then flew to Kauai to play John Hammond, the creator of the doomed dinosaur park in “Jurassic Park.” At age 70, Attenborough became a player in the most successful box-office moneymaker in history. His character was a cane-wielding, visionary billionaire with God-like ambitions. The film roared across the world’s movie screens. Attenborough captured with unforgettable skill the moment Hammond realizes h’s dealing with epic failure: he listens over the phone as his terrified visitors get attacked by dinosaurs. It is one of moviedom’s most perfect “RUUUNN!!” moments ever.
A far cry from T. rex jaws, this movie stars Attenborough as Oxford author C.S. Lewis in a tender drama about his love affair with brash American poet Joy Davidman, played by Debra Winger in an Oscar-nominated performance. Author of the “Narnia” series, Lewis was a noted Christian theologian facing a test of his faith when he fell for Davidman.
