Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh is an English screenwriter, producer, director and former actor with a film, theatre, and television career spanning more than 60 years. His accolades include prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Venice International Film Festival, three BAFTA Awards, and nominations for seven Academy Awards. He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry.
Leigh studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. His short-lived acting career included the role of a mute in the 1963 Maigret episode "The Flemish Shop". He began working as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s. Leigh is known for his lengthy rehearsal and improvisation techniques with actors to build characters and narrative for his films. His purpose is to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films".
Leigh's early films include Bleak Moments, Meantime, Life Is Sweet, and Naked. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake. He received further Academy Award nominations for Topsy-Turvy, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Another Year. Other notable films include All or Nothing, Mr. Turner, Peterloo, and Hard Truths. His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's a Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy and Abigail's Party.
Early life and education
Leigh was born on 20 February 1943 to Phyllis Pauline and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor. Leigh was born at Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, at the time a maternity home. His mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Leigh was brought up in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire. He attended North Grecian Street Junior School. He is from a Jewish family; his paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. The family name, originally Lieberman, was anglicised in 1939 "for obvious reasons". When the war ended, Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film, Bleak Moments. There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.Outside school, Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Labour Zionist youth movement Habonim. In the late 1950s, he attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all round the country. During this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte. His father strongly opposed the idea that Leigh might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors who came to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests. In 1960, "to his utter astonishment", Leigh won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School, where he met the actress Alison Steadman.
Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, finding himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes, and became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique on Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows, an improvised film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed "living, loving and bickering" on the streets of New York, and Leigh "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors". Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker—"Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the production"—Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and Flann O'Brien, whose "tragi-comedy" Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw in this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear and in 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisation, the actors basing their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Picasso, Ronald Searle, George Grosz, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. Leigh had small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC Television series Maigret. In 1964–65, he collaborated with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.
Leigh has been called "a gifted cartoonist... a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television."
Career
1965–1979: Plays and television films
In 1965, Leigh went to work at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham as a resident assistant director and started to experiment with the idea that writing and rehearsing could be part of the same process. The Box Play, a family scenario staged in a cagelike box, "absorbed all sorts of contemporary ideas in art such as the space frames of Roland Pichet..it was visually very exciting," and two more "improvised" pieces followed.After the Birmingham interlude, Leigh found a flat in Euston, where he lived for the next ten years. In 1966–67, he worked as an assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company on productions of Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Taming of the Shrew. He worked on an improvised play of his own with some professional actors called NENAA, which explored the fantasies of a Tynesider working in a café, with ideas of founding an arts association in the northeast.
In 1970, Leigh wrote, "I saw that we must start off with a collection of totally unrelated characters and then go through a process in which I must cause them to meet each other, and build a network of real relationships; the play would be drawn from the results." After Stratford-upon-Avon, Leigh directed a couple of London drama school productions that included Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore at E15 Acting School in Loughton—where he met Alison Steadman for the first time. In 1968, wanting to return to Manchester, he sublet his London flat and moved to Levenshulme. Taking up a part-time lectureship in a Catholic women teachers training college, Sedgley Park, he ran a drama course and devised and directed Epilogue, focusing on a priest with doubts, and for the Manchester Youth Theatre he devised and directed two big-cast projects, Big Basil and Glum Victoria and the Lad with Specs.
As the decade came to a close, Leigh knew he wanted to make films, and that "The manner of working was at last fixed. There would be discussions and rehearsals. Plays or films would develop organically with actors fully liberated into the creative process. After an exploratory improvisation period, Leigh would write a structure, indicating the order in which scenes happened, usually with a single bare sentence: Johnny and Sophie meet; Betty does Joy's hair; And it was rehearsed and rehearsed until it achieved the required quality of 'finish'."
In the 1970s, Leigh made nine television plays. Earlier plays such as Nuts in May and Abigail's Party tended more toward bleak yet humorous satire of middle-class manners and attitudes. His plays are generally more caustic, stridently trying to depict society's banality. Goose-Pimples and Abigail's Party focus on the vulgar middle class in a convivial party setting that spirals out of control. The television version of Abigail's Party was made at some speed; Steadman was pregnant at the time, and Leigh's objections to flaws in the production, particularly the lighting, led to his preference for theatrical films.
1980–1993: Early British films
In 1983, Leigh directed the comedy-drama film Meantime, starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. The project was shown on Channel 4 and premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. For The Criterion Collection, Sean O'Sullivan wrote that the film was addressing "the crisis of national identity triggered by Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979".There was something of a hiatus in Leigh's career after his father died in February 1985. Leigh was in Australia at the time—having agreed to attend a screenwriters' conference in Melbourne at the start of 1985, he had then accepted an invitation to teach at the Australian Film School in Sydney—and he then "buried his solitude and sense of loss in a busy round of people, publicity and talks". He gradually extended "the long journey home", visiting Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. He has said, "The whole thing was an amazing, unforgettable period in my life. But it was all to do with personal feelings, my father, where to go next, and my desire to make a feature film. I felt I was at the end of one stage of my career and at the start of another."
Leigh's 1986 project code-named "Rhubarb", for which he had gathered actors in Blackburn, including Jane Horrocks, Julie Walters and David Thewlis, was cancelled after seven weeks' rehearsals, and Leigh returned home. "The nature of what I do is totally creative, and you have to get in there and stick with it. The tension between the bourgeois suburban and the anarchist bohemian that is in my work is obviously in my life, too...I started to pull myself together. I didn't work, I simply stayed at home and looked after the boys." In 1987 Channel 4 put up some money for a short film and, with Portman Productions, agreed to co-produce Leigh's first feature film since Bleak Moments.
In 1988, Leigh and producer Simon Channing Williams founded Thin Man Films, a film production company based in London, to produce Leigh's films. They chose the company name because neither of them was thin. Later in 1988, Leigh made High Hopes, about a disjointed working-class family whose members live in a rundown flat and a council house. His later films, such as Naked and Vera Drake, are somewhat starker and more brutal, and concentrate more on the working class. Leigh's stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy, and Abigail's Party.
In the 1990s, Leigh enjoyed critical successes, including such films as the comedy Life Is Sweet starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Claire Skinner, and Jane Horrocks. It was his third feature film, and follows a working-class North London family over a few summer weeks. Film critic Philip French in The Observer defended the film against criticism that it was patronising: "Leigh has been called patronising. The charge is false. The Noël Coward/David Lean film This Happy Breed, evoked by Leigh in several panning shots across suburban back gardens, is patronising. Coward and Lean pat their characters on the back...Leigh shakes them, hugs them, sometimes despairs over them, but never thinks that they are other than versions of ourselves." Independent Spirit Awards nominated Life Is Sweet for Best International Film.
Leigh's fourth feature film was the black comedy Naked, starring David Thewlis. It premiered at the 46th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won Best Director for Leigh and Best Actor for Thewlis. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian wrote that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist."