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Billy Liar! (film)
''Billy Liar'' is a 1963 British CinemaScope comedy-drama film based on Billy Liar, the 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse. Directed by John Schlesinger, it stars Tom Courtenay (who had understudied Albert Finney in the West End theatre adaptation of the novel) as Billy and Julie Christie as Liz, one of his three girlfriends. Mona Washbourne plays Mrs. Fisher and Wilfred Pickles plays Mr. Fisher. Rodney Bewes, Finlay Currie and Leonard Rossiter also feature. The Cinemascope photography is by Denys Coop and Richard Rodney Bennett supplied the score. The film belongs to the British New Wave, inspired by both the earlier kitchen sink realism movement and the French New Wave. Characteristic of the style is a documentary film, documentary/''cinéma vérité'' feel and the use of real locations (in this case, many in the city of Bradford in Yorkshire). Plot Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) lives in Yorkshire with his parents (Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne) and grandmother (Ethel Griffi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Schlesinger
John Richard Schlesinger (; 16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for ''Midnight Cowboy'', and was nominated for the same award for two other films ('' Darling'' and ''Sunday Bloody Sunday''). Early life Schlesinger was born and raised in Hampstead, London, in a Jewish family, the eldest of five children of distinguished Emmanuel College, Cambridge-educated paediatrician and physician Bernard Edward Schlesinger (1896–1984), OBE, FRCP, who had also served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a brigadier, and his wife Winifred Henrietta, daughter of Hermann Regensburg, a stockbroker from Frankfurt. She had left school at 14 to study at the Trinity College of Music, and later studied languages at the University of Oxford for three years. Bernard Schlesinger's father Richard, a stockbroker, had come to England in the 1880s from Frankfurt. After St Edmund's School, Hindhead and Uppingham School (whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |