Philip French
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Philip French OBE |
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|---|---|
French in a 2013 interview
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| Born |
Philip Neville French 28 August 1933 Liverpool, England |
| Died | 27 October 2015 (aged 82) |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Bristol Grammar School |
| Alma mater |
Exeter College, Oxford Indiana University Bloomington |
| Occupation | Film critic |
| Years active | 1957–2013 |
| Spouse(s) | Kersti French |
| Children | 3 |
Philip Neville French OBE (28 August 1933 – 27 October 2015) was an English film critic and former radio producer. French began his career in journalism in the late 1950s, before eventually becoming a BBC Radio producer, and later a film critic. He began writing for The Observer in 1963, and continued to write criticism regularly there until his retirement in 2013.
French was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in December 2012. Today, he is sometimes derided for having originally panned films which later went on to become classics, such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – but he was nevertheless an influential figure. Upon his death on 27 October 2015, French was referred to by his Observer successor Mark Kermode as "an inspiration to an entire generation of film critics".
French was born in Liverpool in 1933. The son of an insurance salesman, he was educated at the direct grant Bristol Grammar School and then at Exeter College, Oxford where he read Law. He undertook post-graduate study in Journalism at Indiana University Bloomington, on a scholarship.
French entered journalism as a reporter at the Bristol Evening Post in 1957. He was theatre critic of the New Statesman between 1967 and 1968 and deputy film critic to David Robinson at The Times for some years. French was the film critic of The Observer from 1978, but had begun writing for the paper in 1963. He also wrote for Sight and Sound. French's books include The Movie Moguls: An Informal History of the Hollywood Tycoons (1969) and Westerns, which reappeared in a revised version in 2005. He also wrote the book Cult Movies (1999) together with Karl French, one of his sons.
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