Richard Attenborough - biography

“At my age the only problem is with remembering names.  When I call everyone darling, it has damn all to do with passionately adoring them, but I know I’m safe calling them that.  Although, of course, I adore them too.”

“I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant, that don’t come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, and argument and so on, and I can’t do that and I’m not in that bracket at all.”

“What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.”

“Well, I think In Love and War, which had a wonderful performance by Sandy, Sandra Bullock, who the authorities and, the supposed authorities, in cinema didn’t want to know about.”

“I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.”

“David has asked me, a number of people have asked me and said, What performance do you like best or what’s the best film you’ve made and so on and I don’t really have any hesitation that the film I’m least embarrassed by and ashamed of or uneasy about is Shadowlands.”

“If you’ve ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.”

“In other words, if you - the cost of promoting movies, the advertising and promotion of a movie, the budget is almost as large as the cost of the movie.”

“Pier Angeli was in the movie called Sea of Sand that Guy Green directed where this idea came up.”

“There’s nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.”

“And there are certain things, and they are evident, obviously, without being boring about it, but I mean obviously, the two evident and easy ones being Gandhi and Cry Freedom, there are things which I do care about very much and which I would like to stand up and be counted.”

“Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.”

“And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by.”

“I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.”

“I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.”

“I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody’s life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.”

“I just love biography, and I’m fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.”

“I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that’s ever lived.”

“I can’t write, I can’t paint, I don’t compose.”

“I do care about style.  I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject.”

“I don’t read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.”

“I prefer fact to fiction.”

“I was on my own union council for twenty-odd years.”

“I’m a passionate trade unionist.”

Richard Attenborough has appeared in the following films:
In Which We Serve (1942)
Schweik’s New Adventures (1943)
The Hundred Pound Window (1944)
Journey Together (1946)
School for Secrets (1946)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
The Man Within (1947)
Dancing with Crime (1947)
Brighton Rock (1947)
London Belongs to Me (1948)
The Guinea Pig (1948)
The Lost People (1949)
Boys in Brown (1949)
Morning Departure (1950)
Hell Is Sold Out (1951)
The Magic Box (1951)
Gift Horse (1952)
Father’s Doing Fine (1952)
Eight O’Clock Walk (1954)
The Ship That Died of Shame (1955)
Private’s Progress (1956)
The Baby and the Battleship (1956)
Brothers in Law (1957)
The Scamp (1957)
Dunkirk (1958)
The Man Upstairs (1958)
Sea of Sand (1958)
Danger Within (1959)
I’m All Right Jack (1959)
Jet Storm (1959)
SOS Pacific (1959)
The Angry Silence (1960)
The League of Gentlemen (1960)
Only Two Can Play (1962)
All Night Long (1962)
The Dock Brief (1962)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Third Secret (1964)
Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)
Guns at Batasi (1964)
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Doctor Dolittle (1967)
Only When I Larf (1968)
The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
Loot (1970)
The Last Grenade (1970)
A Severed Head (1970)
10 Rillington Place (1971)
Cup Glory (1972)
Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab (1974)
Rosebud (1975)
Brannigan (1975)
Conduct Unbecoming (1975)
Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977)
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
The Human Factor (1979)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Miracle on 34th Street (1994)
E=mc2 (1996)
Hamlet (1996)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Elizabeth (1998)
Puckoon (2002)
Ironclad (2009)


Richard Attenborough directed the following films:
Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)
Young Winston (1972)
Magic (1978)
Gandhi (1982)
Chorus Line (1985)
Cry Freedom (1987)
Chaplin (1992)
Shadowlands (1993)
In Love and War (1996)
Grey Owl (1999)
Closing the Ring (2007)