John Schlesinger - Career

Career

Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre and The Vise. He began his directorial career in 1956 with the short documentary Sunday in the Park about London's Hyde Park. In 1959 he was credited as exterior or second unit director on 23 episodes of the TV series The Four Just Men and four 30-minute episodes of the series Danger Man.

By the 1960s, he had virtually given up acting to concentrate on a directing career, and another of his earlier directorial efforts, the British Transport Films' documentary Terminus (1961), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.

His third feature film, Darling (1965), tartly described the modern urban way of life in London and was one of the first films about 'swinging London'. Schlesinger's next film was the period drama Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's popular novel accentuated by beautiful English country locations. Both films featured Julie Christie as the female lead. Schlesinger's next film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), filmed in the United States, was internationally acclaimed. A story of two hustlers living on the fringe in the bad side of New York City, it was Schlesinger's first movie shot in the U.S., and it won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. During the 1970s, he made an array of movies about loners, losers, and people outside the clean world. Later, after Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), he worked on films that attracted mixed responses from the public, and few dollars. In Britain, he did better with films like Madame Sousatzka (1988) and Cold Comfort Farm (1995).

His later films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Yanks (1979), An Englishman Abroad (1983), The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), Pacific Heights (1990), the TV play A Question of Attribution (1991), The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000).

Schlesinger also directed Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London's Piccadilly Theatre. From 1973 he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre, where he produced Shaw's Heartbreak House (1975). He also directed several operas, beginning with Les contes d'Hoffmann (1980) and Der Rosenkavalier (1984), both at Covent Garden.

Schlesinger also directed a notable party political broadcast for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom general election of 1992 which featured Prime Minister John Major returning to Brixton in south London, where he had spent his teenage years, which highlighted his humble background, atypical for a Conservative politician. Schlesinger admitted to having voted for all three main political parties in the UK at one time or another.

The book and TV series The Glittering Prizes, written by Frederic Raphael, who won the Best Screenwriting Oscar for his work on Schlesinger's film Darling, feature a character believed to be based on Schlesinger.

In 2003, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars was dedicated to him.

In 1991, Schlesinger made a rare return to acting by appearing in a cameo role in the BBC made-for-television film The Lost Language of Cranes, in which he played a gay character.