The film director Lewis Gilbert, who has died aged 97, never sought the limelight: he always said he wanted his films to speak for him, and several of them, including Alfie (1966) and Educating Rita (1983), have become part of cinema history.
Alfie is the story of an amoral young man who philosophises to camera on sex, love and women as he pursues sexual encounters with one girl after another. Paramount wanted the setting moved to New York and Tony Curtis to play Alfie, but Gilbert held out for Michael Caine. Caine’s performance assured his career, and the film was nominated for five Oscars.
Alfie’s success brought Gilbert his first Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), to be followed a decade later by The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in 1979 by Moonraker. Lewis wryly commented that in earlier years he used to make a feature film for less than the Moonraker telephone bill.
It was Gilbert’s wife, Hylda, who brought Educating Rita to his attention and, having resisted studio pressure, this time again to move the setting to the US and to cast Dolly Parton as Rita, he finally raised the finance, despite not having any distribution deals in place, and cast Julie Walters and Caine. The film received three Oscar nominations and Hollywood studios vied to distribute it. He followed this with Shirley Valentine in 1989 with Pauline Collins as a housewife striking out for freedom in Greece.
Gilbert was what he described as an unfashionable director and considered this to have been why he survived for so long in the film industry. “I’ve never been known for any one kind of film. So, I’m really somebody like a doctor who you call in when you want the patient to live, as it were.”
Born in London into a vaudeville family, Gilbert began touring in an act, the Four Kemptons, with his parents when he was four. His love of theatre and film began there – he watched films, shown as part of the vaudeville programmes, from behind the screen. He went to a theatrical school when he was 12 and he also entered cinema as an actor, appearing in quota quickies, including The Price of a Song (1935) directed by Michael Powell, and Over the Moon (1939).
It was while he was appearing with Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X (1938) that Alexander Korda, the producer, offered to send him to Rada. Gilbert replied that he would rather direct and so was sent to Korda’s Denham studios in Buckinghamshire as a third assistant director. He graduated up the scale, working with Alfred Hitchcock on Jamaica Inn (1939) – “He was the man I learned the most from” – and with a variety of studios, eventually becoming a first assistant.
At the beginning of the second world war, Gilbert volunteered for the RAF and from there he went to the US Army Air Forces film unit, where he worked on documentaries with Hollywood veterans such as William Wyler, Frank Capra and William Keighley. This gave Gilbert his directing break, as Keighley, hating the British winter cold, preferred his Mayfair hotel to going out filming. During this time he met Arthur Elton, and on being invalided out in 1944 took up his offer of a job at Gaumont-British Instructional directing documentaries.
His first feature, The Little Ballerina (1947), a children’s film with Margot Fonteyn, was successful to the point where, after its Saturday morning children’s run, it was put out on a circuit release. His first major success was Emergency Call (1952, known in the US as The Hundred Hour Hunt), in which Jack Warner has a race against time to find three people with the right blood type to save a child’s life.
He co-wrote the film with Vernon Harris, who became a collaborator for more than 40 years. Gilbert followed this with Cosh Boy (1953, also known as The Slasher), featuring Joan Collins, an X film which was widely banned – “Today, you’d show it to 10-year-olds” – and Johnny on the Run (1953), the first film which he also produced.
Gilbert’s long and varied career included thrillers and a number of war movies – “The war was the single biggest influence in my life, a very traumatic time. I think it was natural in the years after the war had ended to make films that were part propaganda and part portraits of heroism.” These included Albert RN (1953), which the producers had originally wanted shot in 3D, The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954) and Reach for the Sky (1955), Gilbert’s personal favourite, in which Kenneth More played the war hero Douglas Bader.
Then followed Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) the true story of the secret agent Violette Szabo, Sink the Bismarck! (1960), HMS Defiant (1962) and Operation: Daybreak (1975). This last Gilbert felt could never be commercial because “it was very realistic and very downbeat but it was a true picture, whilst the earlier films may almost have glamorised wartime”.
In 1959 he had an unhappy experience working with Orson Welles on Ferry to Hong Kong. Gilbert had wanted Peter Finch to play the tramp and Curt Jurgens to play the officer. Instead he got Welles as the captain. Aside from the poor script, Gilbert said, Welles hated Jurgens and every scene that involved both of them had to be shot separately. The film and the overall strategy failed.
The Greengage Summer (1961, also known as Loss of Innocence), starring More (the producers had wanted Richard Burton, but he decided on Alexander the Great instead), was a happier affair, although, during the shooting, a blight on greengage trees forced them to buy in supplies of the fruit from Harrods and stick them on to the trees.
He continued working well into his 80s, and directed Walters again on his last feature film, Before You Go (2002). Always highly professional in his work, Gilbert was also a charming, unaffected and kind man with a friendly welcome for everyone. He and Hylda loved attending festivals (especially the annual festival in Cannes, where they had a flat) and going to screenings to look at the widest possible range of new films from directors of all ages and, most importantly, happily discussing them afterwards.
In 1990, he was awarded the Michael Balcon lifetime achievement award from Bafta, and he was appointed CBE in 1997. In 2010, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Bafta held an evening of celebration at which he was interviewed on stage by Walters. He published his autobiography, All My Flashbacks, and appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in the same year.
Hylda (nee Tafler), whom he married in 1951, died in 2005. They had two sons, John and Stephen.
Lewis Gilbert, film director, producer and writer, born 6 March 1920; died 23 February 2018
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