Jack Clayton
| Jack Clayton | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 March 1921 Brighton, England |
| Died | 26 February 1995 (aged 73) Berkshire, England |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1936–1992 |
| Spouse(s) |
Christine Norden (1947–53) (divorced) Katherine Kath (1953-?) (divorced) Haya Harareet (1984–1995) (his death) |
Jack Clayton (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was a British film director, who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.
Starting out as a teenage studio "tea boy" in 1935, Clayton worked his way up through British film industry in a career that spanned nearly 60 years. He rapidly rose through a series of increasingly important roles in British film production, before shooting to international prominence as a director with his Oscar-winning feature film debut, the landmark 1959 drama Room at the Top.
Clayton looked set for a brilliant future, and he was highly regarded by peers and critics alike, but a number of overlapping factors hampered his career. He was a notably 'choosy' director, who by his own admission "never made a film I didn't want to make", and he repeatedly turned down films (including Alien) that became huge hits for other directors. But he was also dogged by bad luck and bad timing - the Hollywood studios labelled him as 'difficult', and studio politics quashed a string of planned films in the 1970s, which were either taken out of his hands, or cancelled in the final stages of preparation. In 1977 he suffered a double blow - his current film was cancelled just two weeks before shooting was due to begin, and a few months later he suffered a serious stroke which robbed him of the ability to speak, and put his career on hold for five years.
Although Clayton worked almost constantly on a wide range of significant projects during his years as a director, most either never made it into production, or wound up being made by other directors, and he was only able to complete seven feature films before his death in 1995. However, despite this relatively small oeuvre, the films of Jack Clayton continue to be appreciated, and both they and their director have been widely admired and praised by leading film critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, and by film industry peers including Harold Pinter, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, François Truffaut, Tennessee Williams and Steven Spielberg.
Born in Brighton, Clayton started his career as a child actor on the 1929 film Dark Red Roses. Giving up on his earlier aspiration to become a speed skater he joined Alexander Korda's Denham Film Studios in 1935 at the age of 14, and rose from tea boy to assistant director to film editor.
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