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Director:

Karel Reisz

  • Born: Jul 21, 1926 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia
  • Died: Nov 25, 2002
  • Occupation: Director
  • Active: '60s-'80s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Crime
  • Career Highlights: This Sporting Life, Who'll Stop the Rain?, Morgan!
  • First Major Screen Credit: We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959)

Biography

Czech-born Karel Reisz was 12 when his father, a Jewish lawyer, felt it expedient to bundle his son to England before Hitler entrenched himself in the Sudetenland. Sadly, Reisz ended up the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Educated at the Quaker's Leighton Park School, Reisz served with the RAF, then became a chemistry student at Cambridge. After two years as a teacher in the London school system, Reisz began writing film criticism for such specialized magazines as Sight and Sound. With fellow future director Lindsay Anderson, Reisz founded the influential film periodical Sequence. After the publication of his book The Technique of Film Editing (a remarkably incisive effort, considering that he'd never set foot on a movie soundstage), Reisz was a firmly established leader of Britain's Free Cinema movement; he got a chance to put his theories in practice when he and Tony Richardson co-directed the influential "night life" documentary Momma Don't Allow (1955). He turned to non-documentary filmmaking with his first solo feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), essentially an outgrowth of the disenfranchised-youth theme he'd previously explored in Momma Don't Allow. Most of his later films were celebrations of eccentric individualism, such as Morgan! (1966), Isadora (1968), and The Gambler (1974). In 1981, Reisz, together with scenarist Harold Pinter, met and mastered the challenge of translating John Fowles' complex novel The French Lieutenant's Woman to the screen. Twice married, Karel Reisz's second wife was actress Betsy Blair, best known for her portrayal of the "dog" heroine in Marty (1955). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

 
 
Wikipedia: Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz
Born July 21 1926(1926--)
Ostrava, Czechoslovakia
Died November 25 2002 (aged 76)
London, England
Spouse(s) Betsy Blair (1963-2002)

Karel Reisz (born July 211926, Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, died London, United Kingdom, November 252002) was one of the most important filmmakers in post–war Britain.

Reisz was a Jewish[1] refugee, one of the 669 rescued by Sir Nicholas Winton. Ahter attending Leighton Park School, he joined the Royal Air Force towards the end of the war, after the death of his parents at Auschwitz. After the war, he studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and began to write for film journals, including Sight and Sound. He co-founded Sequence with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert in 1947.

He was also a founder member of the Free Cinema documentary movement. His 1959 film We Are the Lambeth Boys was a naturalistic depiction of the members of a South London boys' club, which was unusual in showing the leisure life of working-class teenagers as it was, with skiffle music and cigarettes, cricket, drawing and discussion groups. The film represented Britain at the Venice Film Festival. The BBC made two follow-up films about the same people and youth club, broadcast in 1985.

His first feature film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) was based on a social realist novel by Alan Sillitoe, and used many of the same techniques as his earlier documentaries. In particular, scenes filmed at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham have the now familiar look of a documentary, and give the story a vivid sense of verisimilitude.

He produced This Sporting Life (1963), and directed Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966), Isadora (1968), The Gambler (1974), Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Sweet Dreams (1985), and Everybody Wins (1990) among others, and was a patron of the British Film Institute.

In 1963 he married Betsy Blair, the former wife of American actor and singer Gene Kelly, and they remained married until Reisz's death in 2002.

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Variety Club - Jewish Chronicle colour supplement "350 years"", The Jewish Chronicle, 2006-12-15, pp. 28-29. Retrieved on 2006-12-24. 

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Director. Copyright © 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Karel Reisz".  Read more

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