Diaries from the Archive – Lindsay Anderson
First in our series highlighting amazing diaries from our Archives and Special Collections is the run of diaries we hold in the Lindsay Anderson Archive.
Lindsay Anderson (1923-94), born in Bangalore, India, was a film-maker, theatre director, critic and actor. The son of a British army officer, he attended Cheltenham College and Oxford University where he founded the film magazine Sequence in 1947 with Tony Richardson, Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz. The magazine took a critical approach to the British cinema of the time and championed what it saw as the more vibrant, imaginative and artistic films coming from the US and Europe. Lindsay Anderson became a documentary film-maker in the 1950s, winning an Oscar for Thursday’s Children, a documentary about a school for deaf children, in 1954. He was one of the founders of the ‘Free Cinema’ movement of the mid 1950s which challenged the established cosy images of British life with a series of dramas and documentaries portraying subjects hitherto rarely seen on screen.
In 1962 Anderson directed his first feature film, This Sporting Life, starring Richard Harris. In 1968 Anderson made If…., one of the most important British films of the 1960s which won the Palm D’or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. If…. was the beginning of a trilogy of films made by Anderson that provided a controversial comment on the state of the nation. It was followed by O Lucky Man! (1972) and Britannia Hospital (1982). Lindsay Anderson also had a long and distinguished career in the theatre. He directed many productions for the Royal Court Theatre and also wrote a number of works on the cinema including Making a Film – the Story of Secret People (1952) and About John Ford (1981). His final work was the autobiographical television documentary Is that all there is? (1992).
The Lindsay Anderson Archive was transferred to the University of Stirling in 2001 and comprises his working and personal papers dated from 1910-1994. Within his personal papers sits a run of 91 diaries which chronicle fifty years of Anderson’s life from 1942-1992. In these there are inevitable mentions and discussions of his work but they also delve deeply into his personal and private thoughts.
