Dickie Attenborough

If twenty first century youth know Richard Attenborough at all it is most likely as the misguided scientist and businessman who runs “Jurassic Park”.  In some ways the role is the closest ‘Dickie’ has ever come to poking fun at the image of his equally famous brother, the naturalist and television icon, David Attenborough.

A measure of how engrained in the fabric of British cinema Dickie is came four decades ago when Monty Python based one of their better skits around his even then well known propensity to give tearful, rambling speeches at award ceremonies.  Dressed in a gaudy tuxedo, with torrents of water streaming out the side of especially designed glasses, Eric Idle’s Attenboroughesque exaggeration of the word “A-CA-DEMMY” was equal parts parody and homage.  In theatrical terms Attenborough is a “lovee”, an artist who wears the love of his craft and his collaborators on his sleeve.

Attenborough the actor has always specialised in human weakness.  The cowardly or nervous types that he plays so well are the antithesis of the stoic, stiff upper lip heroics that one normally associates with English film.  Attenborough is in a sense the anti-John Mills.  Appropriately he made his debut opposite Mills in the David Lean/Noel Coward World War II drama “In Which We Serve”.  Without any dialogue at all, using only body language and his round, soft and emotive face, Attenborough is unforgettable as the one seaman who abandons his post when his ship is under fire.

Arguably his best part came in 1947 in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock”.  Playing a loathsome, unsympathetic gangster, Attenborough is the equal of any American film noir villain, cruelly mistreating his teenage girlfriend and cutting up rivals with a knife.

Not content to be merely an actor, Attenborough branched out into producing in the early 1960s.  His collaboration with the actor, writer and director Bryan Forbes produced three genuine classics: the Hayley Mills vehicle “Whistle Down the Wind”, the expose of trade union corruption “The Angry Silence” and the psychological thriller cum horror story “Seance on a Wet Afternoon”.  Attenborough’s performances in the last two are superb character studies of men under pressure, the first a worker blacklisted by colleagues and his employer alike after he refuses to go on strike, the second a hen-pecked husband forced to kidnap a little girl in order to further his wife’s career as a medium.

Dickie directed his initial feature in 1969, a musical about World War I called “Oh, What a Lovely War!”  Its pacifist themes were revisited thirteen years later in his most successful directorial effort, the multi Oscar winner biopic “Gandhi”, a project Attenborough struggled for over two decades to get off the ground.  For all that these films critique British colonialism, and militarism his artistry is sufficiently broad to celebrate these concepts as well: “Young Winston” is an account of Churchill’s early life told in the manner of a ‘Boy’s Own’ annual and “A Bridge Too Far” a stirring ode to the fallen of Arnhem.