In the original dustsheet. Grey board binding with red title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

This is an elegant, intimate and witty biography of one of the foremost figures of post-war British cinema and theatre. Lindsay Anderson’s About John Ford combined a critical biography with a memoir of his guarded friendship with the great Western director. Now Gavin Lambert, a close friend of Anderson’s since schooldays, has essayed a similar tribute to Anderson himself. Lambert celebrates Anderson’s inimitable films (If . . ., O Lucky Man, Britannia Hospital), and his remarkable theatrical collaboration with David Storey (The Changing Room, Home, In Celebration). Lambert has enjoyed access to Anderson’s private journals, which span fifty years of his life and shed important light on his personality; and he has interviewed numerous colleagues and friends including Alan Bates, Alan Bennett, Stephen Frears, Helen Mirren and Karel Reisz.

Book Description: Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, by Gavin Lambert, is an elegant, intimate and witty biography of one of the foremost figures of post-war British cinema and theatre.
Review: Director Lindsay Anderson was one of the original Angry Young Men. He may have only made half a dozen features, but singularly anarchic visions such as “If …” and “O Lucky Man” cemented the reputation of a socially aware auteur who saw British cinema very much from the outside. At his prep school in the 1930s, he pinned a notice to the wall that read “I Rebel”. It was a vision to which he was to remain irascible true, for better or worse, throughout his life. Gavin Lambert, himself a novelist and screenwriter, met Anderson at Cheltenham College and they remained friends until Anderson’s death in 1994. The title of his book is slightly misleading, for its main, if unstated, concern is the sibling dynamic between two school friends who pursue similar ends by different paths, with the attendant rivalry and myopia. The interest lies in what Lambert calls the “dual portrait” of one who stayed in the country of which he despaired but from which he drew fire, and the other who fled to pastures warmer and more liberal. Where Lambert is open about his homosexuality, Anderson repressed his sexuality almost completely, allowing glimpses of it privately, but in public only betraying it through his propensity to fall in unrequited love with his leading (often Irish and broody) men, such as Richard Harris and Frank Grimes (your card was marked if Lindsay expressed a desire to direct you as Hamlet). His most fertile working relationship was with playwright David Storey, whose novel This Sporting Life he memorably filmed, and whose plays he was to direct at the Royal Court under he left in a huff in 1975, only to continue the partnership at the National Theatre. Like his hero John Ford, Lambert remarks, Anderson was capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary meanness, the latter fuelled by a suffocating repression and which led him to remark to actor Malcolm McDowell that he wanted as his epitaph, “Surrounded by fucking idiots”. This unique and thoughtful account serves as a far more eloquent memorial to an uncompromising iconoclast who was, as his school friend opines, “faithful to his pungently original, shit-kicking talent”. –David Vincent
The Author, Gavin Lambert was born and educated in England. He co-edited the film magazine Sequence with Lindsay Anderson, was the editor of Sight and Sound and wrote film criticism for the Sunday Times and the Guardian. He is the author of three previous biographies – On Cukor, Norma Shearer, Nazimova – the memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, and seven novels, among them The Slide Area and The Goodbye People. His screenplays include The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, the Oscar-nominated Sons and Lovers and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. He lives in Los Angeles.