Richard Lester was one of the most influential directors of the 1960s, and continued his career as not quite an A-list director (he was too much of an auteur for that) into the 1970s and early '80s. He is best remembered for the two films he helmed starring The Beatles: "A Hard Day's Night (1964)" (1964) and "Help! (1965)" (1965), the frenetic cutting style of which many attribute as the birth of  ...  show all 

Richard Lester was one of the most influential directors of the 1960s, and continued his career as not quite an A-list director (he was too much of an auteur for that) into the 1970s and early '80s. He is best remembered for the two films he helmed starring The Beatles: "A Hard Day's Night (1964)" (1964) and "Help! (1965)" (1965), the frenetic cutting style of which many attribute as the birth of the music video a generation later. Lester actually was given an award by MTV attributing him as the father of the music video. He is not appreciative of the honor as an understanding of his oeuvre shows that that type of style, rooted as it was in the films of Buster Keaton and the other great silent comedians, was atypical of his work. Furthermore, the shots in the two Beatles films are always balanced with framing master-shots, the mise en scene he preferred, whereas music videos eschew most anything but medium-shots and the closeup. (A look at "Superman II (1980)" shows that the film uses mostly static shots in order to create a flat, crowded "comic book" feel. Lester never subjugated function to form.) Richard Lester had made his name with the Oscar-nominated short subject "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960)" that he had made with the Goon Show veterans Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, then had directed Sellers in "The Mouse on the Moon (1963)", which was produced by Walter Shenson. The Goons were a favorite of the Beatles, and when Shenson acquired the franchise for making a Beatles movie, Lester seemed an ideal fit. It was not only a huge box office hit, but it was a major critical success as well. "Village Voice" movie critic Andrew Sarris, the American promoter of the "auteur theory" in America, described "A Hard Day's Night" as "the "Citizen Kane (1941)" of juke box musicals." Lester had arrived, and his next film, the Swinging Sixties yarn "The Knack ...and How to Get It (1965)" won the Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the wildly satirical "How I Won the War (1967)", which came a year after the huge success of his adaptation of the Broadway smash "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)", which relied on the Keatonesque slapstick he had used so well in The Beatles films. ("Forum" even featured Lester's hero Buster Keaton in a small, but highly amusing role.) Aside from "A Hard Day's Night", the success of which relies as much on The Beatles themselves as auteurs (Lester claims that the script by Alun Owen was largely jettisoned during filming, and its scripted quips were replaced by the real things from The Beatles themselves), Lester's true '60s masterpiece is "Petulia (1968)" (1968). A corrosive look at the American upper-middle-class and the fragmentation of American society, "Petulia" is one of the great, if unheralded, American films. Propelled by the numinous presence of Julie Christie and the powerhouse performance of George C. Scott, "Petulia" was a success at the box office, although some critics were upset over the blackness of the comedy. It was to prove to be his last great film, as he stumbled soon after the film was released. "The Bed Sitting Room (1969)", a Samuel Beckett-influenced satire based on a play (and script) by Spike Milligan co-starring Beyond the Fringe's Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke , was a resounding flop at the box office and among critics, and Lester found himself unemployable. "The Three Musketeers (1973)", which he shot simultaneously with "The Four Musketeers (1974)" for producer Ilya Salkind, resurrected his career. When the Salkinds were in he midst of filming "Superman (1978)" simultaneously with its sequel, Lester was hired as a supervising producer, and then took over the filming of the sequel when original director Richard Donner was fired. The sequel was a big hit and a critical success (as much as comic book films were in the early 1980s), and he was hired to direct the far-less successful "Superman III (1983)". At the end of the 1980s, Lester returned to the storyline that had revitalized his career back in the early 1970s, filming a second sequel to "The Three Musketeers." However, after his close friend, the actor Roy Kinnear died during the shooting of "The Return of the Musketeers (1989)", Lester seemed to lose heart with the movie-making business. He has not directed another film.
He entered a university at 15 years old, and after receiving a degree in clinical psychology, he graduated at 19 years old.
Lester, Dick
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