This Happy Breed

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 Anthony James Allan Havelock-Allan, 4th Baronet was a prolific and successful British film producer and screenwriter whose credits included This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet and Ryan's Daughter. Havelock-Allan was born at the family home of Blackwell Grange... near Darlington and was educated at Charterhouse and schools in Switzerland. Before becoming a film producer, he worked as a stockbroker, jeweller, record company executive and cabaret manager. In 1935, Havelock-Allan joined the short-lived British and Dominions Imperial Studios, producing films with them like Lancashire Luck until and even shortly after the studios burnt down in 1936. After working with her on This Man in Paris, Havelock-Allan married actress Valerie Hobson on 12 April 1939. They divorced in 1952. In 1943 he founded his own company, Cineguild and following In Which We Serve, on which he was Associate Producer, in 1945 he, Noël Coward and Ronald Neame produced David Lean's Brief Encounter.
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