Richard Lester

"Village Voice" movie critic Andrew Sarris, the American promoter of the "auteur theory" in America, described "A Hard Day's Night" as "the Citizen Kane (1941) of juke box musicals. " Lester had arrived, and his next film, the Swinging Sixties yarn The Knack. . .

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 581-586. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

His father died at age 57 in 1951, when Richard Lester was only 19; his mother died in 1969 in America, whilst he was in the midst of filming "The Bed-Sitting Room" on a very tight schedule in the UK. He was unable to attend her funeral.

Lester had made his name with the Oscar-nominated short subject The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959) that he made with "The Goon Show" veterans Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.

Richard Lester was one of the most influential directors of the 1960s, and continued his career into the 1970s and early '80s.

His film-directing career consisted of bursts of concentrated activity punctuated by long lulls. Between 1962 and 1969, he directed nine feature films, and then none at all for five years. Between 1973 and 1976, he made six more films. In the next ten years, he made six more feature films, but, apart from a documentary film in 1991, he has made nothing since. During his spells of inactivity, he worked on a very large number of projects which never eventuated as actual movies, including, among many others: a version of Joseph Conrad's novel, "Victory" (scripted by Harold Pinter); a comedy about an actor in Stalinist Russia, based on the stories of Yuriy Korotkov and designed as a vehicle for Robin Williams; a film about a London schoolteacher to be entitled "Eff Off!"; a version of George MacDonald Fraser's first novel "Flashman" (he actually did make a film out of Fraser's first sequel to that book, "Royal Flash"); and a thriller called "Send Him Victorious", set mostly in Africa and due to star the intriguing combination of Jeanne Moreau and Sir Ralph Richardson. Lester tried to set this last project up several times, even using his money to finance its development - he actually went bankrupt (briefly) at one time.

He then directed Sellers in The Mouse on the Moon (1963), which was produced by Walter Shenson. The Goons were a favorite of The Beatles, and when Shenson got the rights to make a movie with The Beatles, Lester seemed to be the ideal director for the project. That project, "A Hard Day's Night", was not only a huge box-office hit but a major critical success as well.

He is best remembered for the two films he helmed starring The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), the frenetic cutting style of which was seen by many as the predecessor of the music video a generation later.

and How to Get It (1965), won the Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 19th Cannes International Film Festival in 1966.

He also directed the wildly satirical How I Won the War (1967), which came a year after the huge success of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), his adaptation of the smash Broadway play, which relied on the Keatonesque slapstick Lester had used so well in The Beatles films ("Forum" even featured Lester's hero Buster Keaton in a small but highly amusing role).

Aside from "A Hard Day's Night", the success of which relies as much on The Beatles themselves as auteurs (Lester claims that the script by Alun Owen was largely jettisoned during filming, and its scripted "quips" were replaced by the real things from The Beatles themselves), Lester's true '60s masterpiece is Petulia (1968) (1968). A corrosive look at the American upper-middle-class and the fragmentation of American society, "Petulia" is one of the great, if unheralded, American films. Propelled by the luminous presence of Julie Christie and the powerhouse performance of George C. Scott, "Petulia" was a success at the box office, although some critics were upset over the blackness of the comedy. It was to prove to be his last great film, as he stumbled soon after it was released.

The Bed Sitting Room (1969), a Samuel Beckett-influenced satire based on a play (and script) by Spike Milligan co-starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke--from the smash revue "Beyond the Fringe"--was a resounding flop at the box office and among critics, and Lester found himself unemployable.

However, The Three Musketeers (1973), which he shot simultaneously with The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1974) for producer Ilya Salkind, resurrected his career.

When the Salkinds (Ilya and his father Alexander Salkind) were in the midst of filming Superman (1978) simultaneously with its sequel, Lester was hired as a supervising producer, then took over the filming of the sequel, Superman II (1980), when original director Richard Donner was fired.

The sequel was a financial and critical success (as much as comic book films were in the early 1980s), and he was hired to direct the far-less successful Superman III (1983).

At the end of the 1980s, Lester returned to the storyline that had revitalized his career back in the early 1970s, filming a second sequel to "The Three Musketeers.

Ironically, he claimed to have never even heard of the Superman character before being hired to work on the films due to comic books not being allowed in his house as a child. This led to many fans and critics suspecting and in some cases accusing Lester of not understanding and therefore not respecting the Superman character, especially judging by the satirical tone and ultimate box-office failure of Superman III (1983).

After the death of Roy Kinnear on the shooting of The Return of the Musketeers (1989), Lester decided to quit directing.

He was interviewed at great length by fellow director Steven Soderbergh for a book, "Getting Away With It", published in 1999. In it he revealed that Sean Connery had never spoken to him after the box-office failure of Cuba (1979); that he had lost confidence as a director following the death of his friend Roy Kinnear, although he did not believe that any negligence had caused it; and also, surprisingly, that he had never actually enjoyed being a film director, although he did enjoy the editing process.