In Which We Serve

Sir David Lean, CBE was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor, best remembered for big-screen epics The Bridge on the River Kwai , Lawrence of Arabia , Doctor Zhivago , and A Passage to India ; for bringing Charles Dickens' novels to the silver screen with films such as Great... Expectations and Oliver Twist ; and for the renowned romantic drama Brief Encounter . Acclaimed by directors including Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick,, Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound Directors' Top Directors" poll 2002. Lean has four films in the top eleven of the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films. David Lean was born in Croydon, Surrey , to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye . His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean , founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University.
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Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise". Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance... academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works , poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
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