JOHN SCHLESINGER Biography - Theater, Opera and Movie personalities

 
 

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JOHN SCHLESINGER

Name: John Richard Schlesinger                                                           
Born: 16 February 1926 London, England                                                   
Died: 25 July 2003 Palm Springs, California                                               
                                                                                         
John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (February 16, 1926 – July 25, 2003) was an English       
film director.                                                                           
                                                                                         
Schlesinger was born in London into a middle class Jewish family, the son of             
Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician.         
He went on to work in television as an actor after graduating from Balliol               
College, Oxford.                                                                         
                                                                                         
One of his first movies, the documentary Terminus (1960), earned him a Venice             
Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two movies, A             
Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were concerned with the life of               
characters based in the North of England. His third Darling (1965) described             
tartly the modern urban way of life in London and was one of the first films             
about swinging London. Schlesinger's next movie was Far From the Madding Crowd (1967),   
an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's popular novel. Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969)       
was internationally acclaimed and it won Oscars for Best Director and Best               
Picture.                                                                                 
                                                                                         
His later films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975),       
Marathon Man (1976), Yanks (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), A Question of                 
Attribution (1991), The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000).                   
Schlesinger also directed Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare               
Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London's Piccadilly Theatre. From         
1973 he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre.                         
                                                                                         
Openly gay, Schlesinger dealt with homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy, Sunday               
Bloody Sunday and The Next Best Thing.                                                   
                                                                                         
Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, before suffering a               
stroke in December 2000. He was taken off life support at Desert Regional                 
Medical Center in Palm Springs on July 24, 2003 by his life partner of over 30           
years, photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger died early the following day           
at the age of 77.