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Ronald Neame
Life Time
23 April 1911 - 16 June 2010
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Ronald Neam was born on April 23, 1914 in London in the family of the famous portrait photographer and film director Alvin Neam and actress Ivy Close. After the death of his father, he had to leave school and earn a living on his own. The search for a job led him to the Elstree film studio, where he initially worked as a messenger. Subsequently, he was an assistant to cinematographer James Cox and as a member of the film crew participated in the creation of Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film Blackmail
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Ronald Neam was born on April 23, 1914 in London in the family of the famous portrait photographer and film director Alvin Neam and actress Ivy Close. After the death of his father, he had to leave school and earn a living on his own. The search for a job led him to the Elstree film studio, where he initially worked as a messenger. Subsequently, he was an assistant to cinematographer James Cox and as a member of the film crew participated in the creation of Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film Blackmail (1929). For several years, he shot low-budget, so-called "quota films", and only later he was entrusted to be the operator of more prestigious pictures of the studio "Ealing" ("Ealing"), including several comedies with the participation of actor-comedian George Formby. Since 1941 began his long-term cooperation with the famous director David Lin. Their first collaborations were the comedy film Major Barbara (1941), based on a play by Bernard Shaw, and the patriotic military drama The One We Serve In (1942, with director and screenwriter Noel Coward). In 1943, he was nominated for an Academy Award for special effects in Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger’s One of Our Planes Missing (1942), and at the same time, together with producer Anthony Haylock-Allan and David Lin, he organized the independent company Cineguild under the auspices of the Rank Organization. As a cameraman, Neem worked on two more of Lin's films based on the plays of Noel Coward - It's a Happy Family (1944) and Restless Spirit (1945), after which he acted as a producer of his films Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Short Encounters (1946) and Passionate Friends (1949). At the end of the forties, Neem made his debut as a director with the crime thrillers Take My Life (1947) and Golden Salamander (1949), but the real success brought him the comedies Map (1952) starring Alec Guinness and A Million Pound Bank Ticket (1953) with guest Hollywood star Gregory Peck. After the military drama The Man Who Never Was (1956), Neem went to Hollywood, where he began filming the Seventh Sin by Somerset Maugham, but the experience was unsuccessful, and another director, American Vincent Minnelli, had to finish work on it. Returning to the UK, Neem made the colonial film The Windom Method (1957) and together with production artist John Bryan founded Knightsbridge Films. Following this, he directed two films that are considered the best in his directorial career - the comedy "The mouth of the artist" (1959) based on the novel by Joyce Carey and psychological drama from the life of the military "Melodies of glory" (1960). The star of these pictures was the popular British actor Alec Guinness, who played in “Melodies of Glory” Scottish officer Jock Sinclair – one of his best roles. In the sixties, Nim shot a number of films, of which the most successful were the criminal comedy Gambit (1966) with the participation of Michael Kane and Shirley MacLaine and the psychological drama Miss Jean Brody in the prime of years (1969), which brought the first Oscar to the lead actress Maggie Smith. The next decade, the director opened the musical Scrooge (1970) based on Charles Dickens’ novel The Christmas Carol, which in many ways resembled Carol Reed’s Oliver, which appeared two years earlier. The U.S.-made film Poseidon Catastrophe (1972) became Nim's most famous and commercially successful directorial work. This story about the passengers of a distressed ocean liner, not only gained wide popularity, but also largely determined the further development of the genre of “catastrophe film”. The political detective “The Odessa Dossier” (1974), staged on the novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, was equally well received, but the science-fiction “Meteor” that followed, for the creation of which huge funds were spent, failed at the box office and had negative reviews from film critics.
Subsequently, Ronald Nim shot two comedy films with the participation of Walter Mattau – “Game in the Classics” (1980) and “The First Day of October” (1981). A few years later, he returned with the comedy Alien Body (1986), the first film in many years made in his homeland. In 1996, for many years of service in the field of cinema, Nim was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Academy of Film and Television and promoted to Commander of the British Empire.
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