Richard Attenborough - Early Life

Early Life

Attenborough was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, the eldest of three sons of Mary Attenborough (née Clegg) a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council and Frederick Levi Attenborough, a scholar and academic administrator who was a don at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and wrote a standard text on Anglo-Saxon law. Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and studied at RADA.

In September 1939, the Attenboroughs took in two German-Jewish refugee girls, Helga and Irene Bejach (aged 9 & 11), who lived with them in College House and were adopted by the family after the war when it was discovered that their parents had been killed. They moved to America in the 1950s and lived with an uncle, where they married and took American citizenship. They are both now deceased.

During the Second World War Attenborough served in the Royal Air Force. After initial pilot training he was seconded to the newly-formed RAF Film Unit at Pinewood Studios, under the command of Flight Lieutenant John Boulting (whose brother Peter Cotes would later direct Attenborough in the play The Mousetrap) where he appeared with Edward G. Robinson in the propaganda film Journey Together (1943). He then volunteered to fly with the Film Unit and after further training, where he sustained permanent ear-damage, qualified as a sergeant, flying on several missions over Europe filming from the rear gunner's position to record the outcome of Bomber Command sorties.