Richard Attenborough

The actor who didn't want to be one

Richard Attenborough wasn't chasing the instant fame of the leading men of his era. In 1942 he made his debut in In Which We Serve, playing a young sailor who loses his nerve in the middle of battle. It was a modest start, but enough to get the British film industry to take notice of him.

He soon specialized in tormented or outright unpleasant characters. In 1947 he played the teenage gangster Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock. It was a role that haunted him for decades, because audiences couldn't separate his friendly face from the character's violence.

But his mind was elsewhere.

He wanted control over the entire creative process, which led him to found his own production company in 1959 with Bryan Forbes. Acting for others wasn't enough. He needed to decide which stories deserved to be told on the big screen.

Twenty Years Chasing a Ghost

For two decades he tried to convince Hollywood's major studios to finance a biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Nobody believed a film about a man in a sheet preaching peace could sell tickets. So he mortgaged his home and sold part of his art collection so he wouldn't abandon the project.

In 1982 he premiered Gandhi.

The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It was recognition for a man who had put his personal fortune on the line for an idea. The film grossed 127 million dollars worldwide.

That success allowed him to direct large-scale projects such as A Bridge Too Far in 1977 and the musical A Chorus Line in 1985. But not all of his efforts were well received by critics of the time. Some experts felt his style was too classical and not daring enough for the new era.

Back in Front of the Mirror

Steven Spielberg called him in 1993 to get him back in front of the cameras. He had gone fifteen years without acting, but the offer to play John Hammond in Jurassic Park was too tempting. The film was a global phenomenon and brought him a popularity he had never sought.

And the gamble paid off.

That same year he made his directing debut with Shadowlands. It is a restrained film that explores the relationship between writer C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham. He chose to focus on the emotional restraint of his actors rather than the grand technical spectacle of his earlier work (such as the thousands of extras he used in India).

In 2007 he directed his last feature film, Closing the Ring. It was a romantic drama that passed through theaters with little notice and closed out a nearly sixty-year career in the film industry. A fall in 2008 left him confined to a wheelchair and permanently limited his public activity.

He died on August 24, 2014 at an artists' residence in London. His personal art collection was auctioned months later for a total of 4.6 million pounds.