Alexander Walker

Alexander Walker was born on March 22, 1930 in Portadown, Northern Ireland.

His top ten films of all time were: Citizen Kane (1941), Wild Strawberries (1957), The 400 Blows (1959), Some Like It Hot (1959), L'Avventura (1960), La Dolce Vita (1960), The Leopard (1963), Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Taxi Driver (1976). Other favourites included The Rules of the Game (1939), Breathless (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Persona (1966), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Godfather (1972), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002).

Was film critic for the London Evening Standard from 1960 until his death in 2003.

He is known for his work on Omnibus (1967), Burton and Taylor (2013) and Garbo (1969).

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1968

Director Ken Russell hit him over the head with a rolled up copy of his own review on live television in 1971.

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974

Walker, an outspoken right-winger politically, was notorious for his vociferous support of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. (He was given a medal for "services to the cinema" at the Manila Film Festival in the 1980s.) When the Marcos regime was finally overthrown and democracy established by the premiership of Mrs. Corey Aquino, Walker went so far as to describe this as "a tragedy".

[September 2004] His final book "Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of almost Everybody in the British Film Industry" was published in the UK by Orion.