Robin Wood (critic)

Robin Wood
Born	23 February 1931 Richmond, Surrey, England
Died	18 December 2009 (aged 78) Toronto, Canada
Cause of death	Leukemia
Occupation	Professor, author, film critic
Partner(s)	Richard Lippe

Robert Paul Wood (23 February 1931 – 18 December 2009) – known as Robin Wood – was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn. Wood was a longtime member - and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto's York University - of the editorial collective which publishes CineACTION!, a film theory magazine. Wood was also York professor emeritus of film.

Wood was born in Richmond, Surrey, England. According to Contemporary Authors he attended Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was influenced by F. R. Leavis and A. P. Rossiter, and graduated in 1953 with a diploma in education. From 1954 to 1958, Wood taught in schools in both England and Sweden. After a year in Lille, France, teaching English, Wood returned to schools in England, and again in Sweden, where he met Aline Macdonald whom he married on 17 May 1960. (They would have three children: Carin, Fiona, and Simon).

Wood began to contribute to the film journal Movie in 1962, primarily on the strength of an essay he wrote for Cahiers du cinéma on Hitchcock's Psycho. In 1965, he published his first book, Hitchcock's Films (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1965). From 1969 to 1972, under the aegis of Peter Harcourt, Wood was a lecturer in film at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. In September 1974, Wood and his wife divorced. Around this time, he also had a relationship with John Anderson, the dedicatee in at least one of Wood's books. Later he was to meet Richard Lippe, with whom he lived from 1977 until his death in 2009.

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