Ivor Montagu

Ivor Montagu
Ivor Montagu in middle age
Born	Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu 23 April 1904 Kensington, London, England
Died	5 November 1984(1984-11-05) (aged 80) Watford, Hertfordshire, England
Known for	Filmmaker, critic, table tennis player, spy
Awards	Lenin Peace Prize International Table Tennis Foundation Hall of Fame

Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu (23 April 1904, Kensington, London – 5 November 1984, Watford) was an English filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, film critic, writer, table tennis player, and Communist activist in the 1930s. He helped to develop a lively intellectual film culture in Britain during the interwar years, and was also the founder of the International Table Tennis Federation.

Montagu was born into enormous wealth, as the third son of Gladys Helen Rachel Goldsmid and Louis Montagu, 2nd Baron Swaythling, a Jewish banking dynasty with a mansion in Kensington. He attended Westminster School and King's College, Cambridge, where he contributed to Granta. He became involved in zoological research.

With Sidney Bernstein he established the London Film Society in 1925, the first British film association devoted to showing art films and independent films. Montagu became the first film critic of The Observer and the New Statesman. He did the post-production work on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger in 1926 and was hired by Gaumont-British in the 1930s, working as a producer on a number of the Hitchcock thrillers. His 1928 silent slapstick movie 'Bluebottles' (slang for police) is included in the British Film Institute's History of the Avant-Garde – Britain in the Twenties. The story was by H G Wells, and the stars of the film were Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, while the remaining cast were his friends including Norman Haire (also Montagu's doctor), Sergei Nolbandov and Joe Beckett.