Major Barbara

Gabriel Pascal was a Hungarian film producer and director. A follower of the guru Shri Meher Baba, Pascal was the first film producer to successfully bring the plays of George Bernard Shaw to the screen. His most successful production was Pygmalion, for which Pascal received an Academy Award... nomination as its producer. Later adaptations of Shaw plays included Major Barbara and Caesar and Cleopatra . Pascal was born during June 1894 in Arad, Austria-Hungary , Pascal coined his own name and his real name remains unknown. Pascal's early life is shrouded in mystery. He claimed to have been an orphan taken from a burning building as a child and raised first by Gypsies before being taken away to an orphanage. He also claimed that the Gypsies taught him to beg, steal, and do acrobatic tricks. It is unclear what parts of his fabulous account of his childhood are true as there are no formal records of him prior to the age of 17 when he was enlisted in military school in Holíč, Hungary, by a mysterious Jesuit priest.
more

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.
more

Harold French was an English director and actor of stage and screen. As an actor most of his roles occurred between 1912 and 1936. He did not garner as much attention as an actor as he would as a director. From 1940 to 1955 he had a several solid box-office successes. This successful period was... clouded by the 1941 death of his wife Phyllis in a bombing raid. Although he did some TV work after 1955 he appears to have retired from directing or acting after 1963. He died in 1997, aged 100.
more