Barry Norman

His top ten films of all time were: Battleship Potemkin (1925), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Rules of the Game (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Rashômon (1950), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Searchers (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), The Seventh Seal (1957) and Some Like It Hot (1959).

Barry Norman was the son of Leslie Norman, a British film and television director, producer and writer, and his wife Elizabeth. He was educated at a state primary school and at Highgate School, then an all-boys independent school in North London. He did not go to university, but instead began his career in journalism at the Kensington News, later spending a period in South Africa where he developed a hostility to the situation created there by the emergence of apartheid. By the 1960s, Norman was a prominent journalist, and show business editor of the Daily Mail until 1971, when he was made redundant. Subsequently, he wrote a column each Wednesday for The Guardian, also contributing leader columns to the newspaper.

He was the best-known film critic in Britain for over 25 years until he was replaced by Jonathan Ross as host of the BBC series Film '72 (1971).

He presented BBC1's Film programme from 1972, becoming the sole presenter the following year.

When he was asked towards the end of his life what he considered to be the worst film he had ever seen, he identified Shivers (1975).

He won the Richard Dimbleby Award in 1980 for "outstanding contribution to factual programming".

He was a supporter of the British Labour Party until the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981. The SDP later merged with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrats.

Norman's involvement was broken in 1982 by a brief spell presenting Omnibus.

He was associated with the phrase "and why not?", which originated not as his catchphrase - though he did say it occasionally on his programmes - but as that of his puppet likeness on the satirical show Spitting Image (1984). Norman later adopted the phrase himself and it was the title of his autobiography.

Reviewing The Glass Menagerie (1987) on his BBC film program in 1987, he remarked that it was amazing that no-one had filmed this famous play before, especially as it had been first staged as long ago as 1954. In fact, the play had been first staged in 1945 and there had been two previous film versions, a Warner Brothers picture of 1950 starring Jane Wyman and a television movie of 1973 starring Katharine Hepburn. The latter film had been shown at the London Film Festival in the winter of 1973 (there were plans, eventually abandoned, to give it a cinema release in Britain), at which time it had been enthusiastically reviewed by many critics - including Barry Norman.

When reviewing David Fincher's Se7en (1995) on his TV program "Film '96", he singled out for high praise the acting of Kevin Pollak. Unfortunately, Kevin Pollak is not in this film--presumably Norman meant Kevin Spacey, who is. However, he did not correct or apologize for this mistake.

He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to broadcasting.

Norman had a family recipe for pickle that has been passed down through generations and was used as the recipe for his own brand of pickled onions, which went on sale in September 2007.

He compiled a list of his "Top 100 films" for the "Radio Times" magazine in January of 2012, which quickly became notorious among film buffs for including only three films--Shoah (1985), Seven Samurai (1954) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)--that were not either British or American. He excluded any films directed by Jean Renoir, Charles Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Sergei M. Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yasujirô Ozu, François Truffaut, John Huston, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang, Claude Chabrol, Alexander Mackendrick, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio De Sica, F.W. Murnau, Josef von Sternberg, Nicolas Roeg, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenji Mizoguchi, Erich von Stroheim or Alain Resnais.

In February 2013, he compiled a list of his "50 Greatest British films" for the "Radio Times" magazine. These were Barry Lyndon (1975), Black Narcissus (1947), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Brief Encounter (1945), Chariots of Fire (1981), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dam Busters (1955), Dr. No (1962), Don't Look Now (1973), Horror of Dracula (1958), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), The Full Monty (1997), Gandhi (1982), Get Carter (1971), Gladiator (2000), Great Expectations (1946), Gregory's Girl (1980), Henry V (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), If.... (1968), The Ipcress File (1965), Kes (1969), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The King's Speech (2010), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Ladykillers (1955), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Local Hero (1983), The Long Good Friday (1980), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), Naked (1993), The Railway Children (1970), The Red Shoes (1948), The Remains of the Day (1993), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Secrets & Lies (1996), Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Servant (1963), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Skyfall (2012), The Third Man (1949), The 39 Steps (1935), This Sporting Life (1963), Trainspotting (1996), Whisky Galore! (1949), and Zulu (1964) (with the 50th to be submitted by the readers).