Ken Annakin
| Ken Annakin | |
|---|---|
Annakin in 1969
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| Born |
Kenneth Cooper Annakin 10 August 1914 Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 22 April 2009 (aged 94) Beverly Hills, California, US |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1941–1992 |
| Children | 2 |
Kenneth Cooper "Ken" Annakin, OBE (10 August 1914 – 22 April 2009) was a prolific English film director.
His career spanned half a century, beginning in the early 1940s and ending in 2002. His career peaked in the 1960s with large-scale adventure films and in all he directed nearly 50 pictures.
Annakin was born in and grew up in Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire where he attended the local grammar school. He began his career in feature films following an early experience making documentaries. Injured in the Liverpool Blitz, he joined the RAF Film Unit, where he worked as camera operator on propaganda films for the Ministry of Information and the British Council. We Serve (1942), a recruiting film for women, was directed by Carol Reed, who made Annakin his assistant director, after which Annakin directed several training films for Verity Films, a group led by Sydney Box, who was about to become head of Gainsborough Pictures. His first filmwork was in 1947 with the Rank Organisation. The following year he moved to Gainsborough Pictures to direct three films about the Huggetts, a working class family living in suburban England. These highly successful films starred Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Petula Clark and Diana Dors, amongst others. Annakin also became known for a series of Walt Disney adventures, including The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953), Third Man on the Mountain (1959) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960), which Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy, considered "one of the greatest family adventure films of all time and a favourite for generations of moviegoers".
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