--- title: Richard Attenborough Remembrance: Gandhi and Generosity description: Sir Dickie, as he was widely known and loved, directed many a sprawling epic — but his signal gift was as an actor of bold, powerful and often creepy range canonical: https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-25T20:01:45.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T09:49:56.969Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Richard Attenborough Remembrance: Gandhi and Generosity og:description: Sir Dickie, as he was widely known and loved, directed many a sprawling epic — but his signal gift was as an actor of bold, powerful and often creepy range og:url: https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb80eedbc055aef5a/6986a0cce8524bed7560469e/richard-attenborough-011.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2350 og:image:height: 1322 og:image:alt: Richard Attenborough og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Richard Attenborough Remembrance: Gandhi and Generosity twitter:description: Sir Dickie, as he was widely known and loved, directed many a sprawling epic — but his signal gift was as an actor of bold, powerful and often creepy range twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb80eedbc055aef5a/6986a0cce8524bed7560469e/richard-attenborough-011.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Remembering Richard Attenborough, the Man Behind _Gandhi_ > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Aug 25, 2014 8:01 PM UTC  RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH -- Pictured: Actor/director/producer Richard Attenborough -- Photo by: David Willis/NBCU Photo Bank RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH -- Pictured: Actor/director/producer Richard Attenborough -- Photo by: David Willis/NBCU Photo BankNBC/Getty Images by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Aug 25, 2014 8:01 PM UTC When Richard Attenborough was a teenager in 1939, his parents wanted to adopt two German Jewish girls fleeing the Third Reich. His mother Mary presented the option to Richard and his two brothers, telling them it was the right thing to do but that the decision was “entirely up to you, darlings.” Of course, the boys said yes. For the rest of his long, accomplished life, Attenborough used the same coaxing charm to get what he wanted from producers, actors and audiences. “Attenborough was an old-school British film mogul who nailed down huge funding or casting decisions over a good lunch,” [Peter Bradshaw wrote in the _Guardian_](http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/24/richard-attenborough-death-sad-british-film-industry). “When he started work on _Gandhi_ in the 1960s, he simply got Mountbatten \[Prince Philip’s uncle\] to introduce him to Nehru \[India’s first Prime Minister\] and took things from there.” At the end of his 20-year campaign to make the movie, he charmed the Motion Picture Academy into giving his grand, stodgy biopic Oscars for Best Picture and Director over another, far superior movie about a strong, benign outsider: Steven Spielberg’s _E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial_. **(READ: Richard Schickel’s** [**review of** **_Gandhi_**](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923124,00.html) **by subscribing to TIME)** Attenborough, who died on Aug. 24 in London, five days before his 91st birthday, knew everyone, from assistants on movie sets to Princess Diana, whom at Prince Charles’ request he coached in public speaking, turning Shy Di into a figure of poised charisma. Diana — everyone — called him Dickie, or, as the official honors piled up, Sir Dickie or Lord Dickie. He had a name for them too: “darling,” his mother’s favorite endearment for her boys. “At my age,” he said in his later years, “the only problem is with remembering names. When I call everyone ‘darling,’ it has damn all to do with passionately adoring them, but I know I’m safe calling them that. Although, of course, I adore them too.” The famously affable Attenborough had sworn off his 30-year acting career when he became a director, but Spielberg lured him back in front of the camera to play the entrepreneur John Hammond in the 1993 film of Michael Crichton’s _Jurassic Park_. In the book, Hammond was a fiendish Frankenstein of capitalism, whose scientists had revived dinosaur species to stock his crackpot-genius idea of a prehistoric theme park. But Spielberg made Hammond a visionary with a kid’s reckless enthusiasm, and Attenborough portrayed him as a Santa Claus bringing kids presents — some of which want to eat their recipients. The following year, Attenborough was Kris Kringle in John Hughes’ remake of _Miracle on 34th Street_. **(READ: Richard Corliss on** [**Attenborough in Spielberg’s** **_Jurassic Park_**](http://entertainment.time.com/2013/04/05/jurassic-park-3d-excitement-and-extinction/)**)** Cheerful beneficence may have been a family legacy: Mary Clegg Attenborough helped found the Marriage Guidance Council (now known as Relate), which dispensed sexual advice to those otherwise afraid of seeking it. Her husband Frederick was a don at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Richard was born on Aug. 29, 1923\. His youngest brother, John, who died in 2012, became an executive at Alfa Romeo; the middle brother is David Attenborough, the polymath host-producer of BBC science series. Richard and David shared an infectious intellectual enthusiasm and the gift for clarifying, perhaps simplifying, big ideas. But Richard was no scholar. He entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (for which he would eventually serve as president) and, after joining the Royal Air Force, was assigned to its film unit, having suffered permanent ear damage during test flights. The curious and salutary aspect of Attenborough’s distinguished acting career, during World War II and for several decades afterward, is that he often played flawed, shady or malevolent characters. He was the cowardly sailor in his 1942 film debut, in Noël Coward and David Lean’s _In Which We Serve_, and the submarine seaman driven close to madness by claustrophobia in _Morning Departure_ (1950). He used a British gunboat to smuggle wine and armaments in _The Ship That Died of Shame_ (1955) and played an electronics expert who sold secrets to the Soviets in _The League of Gentlemen_ (1960). The Attenborough smile may have crinkled into St. Nick benevolence in his 70s, but early on it was the chummy rictus of a man intent on taking your watch, your wife or your life. His most notorious and revered early role was as Pinkie Brown, the 17-year-old crime boss in Graham Greene’s _Brighton Rock_ — first on the West End stage in 1944, when Attenborough was 20, and then in John and Roy Boulting’s film version three years later. Running a small gang in seaside Brighton, Pinkie shoves one man to his death from a haunted-house ride, pushes another off an upstairs landing in his rooming house and scars the face of a third with the straight razor he loves to fondle. Pinkie gets his own cheek slashed by the rival Colleoni gang — sounds like Corleone — and marries the innocent waitress Rose (Carol Marsh) just to keep her quiet or kill her. At her request he makes a recording to memorialize their affair. As Rose gazes lovingly through the booth window, he says, “What you want me to say is I love you. Here’s the truth: I hate ya, ya little slut. Ya make me sick.” When the law closes in, Pinkie nearly persuades the girl to take her own life in what he calls “a suicide pax. That’s Latin for peace.” Turning his smooth, boyish face into a soulless mask and toying with a cat’s cradle of string like a killer’s rosary, suitable for strangling, Attenborough made Pinkie an indelible villain: the mobster as monster. “In those days,” he later recalled, “the character of Pinkie was a macabre novelty in British films. It was hard to understand how somebody like that would feel as he razor-slashed you, or as he told a girl to put a gun in her mouth to shoot herself. That is the kind of enormity I had to convey.” He did it brilliantly, without shouting invective or italicizing his evil. His glassy glance was a Medusa stare, its own mortal weapon. _Brighton Rock_ (named for a hard candy sold at the resort) was one of six films, in a wide range of tones, that Attenborough made for the Boulting twins. In the first, 1945’s _Journey Together_, he played an RAF cadet who must forsake his dream of piloting to become a navigator. In 1948’s _The Guinea Pig_ (known as _The Outsider_ in the U.S.), the 25-year-old convincingly played a 13-year-old working-class boy brought into a posh school as part of a social experiment. Later Boulting brothers films cast Attenborough playing his more familiar shifty persona, with harried upper-class twit Ian Carmichael as his comic foil. In _Private Potter_ (1956) his character steals artworks captured by the Germans to sell them on the black market. In _Brothers in Law_ (1958) he played a worldly-wise barrister with an eye for the ladies. And in the corrosive satire _I’m All Right Jack_ (1959), he played a scurvy businessman who wants to peddle missiles to the Arabs. By his 40s, Attenborough was a respected character actor with an adventurous taste in roles. He was the martinet who bends his own rules to save his men in _Guns at Batasi_ (1964). He was a henpecked husband, either standing by his domineering wife (in 1964’s _Séance on a Wet Afternoon_) or murdering her (in 1962’s _The Dock Brief,_ called _Trial and Error_ in the U.S.). He was the practiced philanderer in the witty social comedies _Only Two Can Play_ (1962) and _A Severed Head_ (1971) and, most boldly, the serial killer John Christie — mousy of demeanor, ruthless of intent and execution — in _10 Rillington Place_ (1971). His Christie makes a perfect cinematic brother to the slick and just as sick Pinkie Brown. But British films couldn’t contain Attenborough’s ambition. He broke into Hollywood with 1963’s _The Great Escape_ — he was Bartlett, the brains of the operation that sprang Steve McQueen, James Garner and the rest from a Nazi stalag — and parlayed that blockbuster into important roles as World War II officers opposite James Stewart in _The Flight of the Phoenix_ (1965) and McQueen again in _The Sand Pebbles_ (1966). And then, having achieved international renown, he realized that what he really wanted to do was direct. **(READ: Richard Corliss’s** [**tribute to James Garner**](http://time.com/3009166/james-garner-maverick/)**)** His first film as director was his most audacious: _Oh! What a Lovely War_, an adaptation of Joan Littlewood’s bleak synoptic history of the Great War set to the songs soldiers sang as they marched to their mass deaths. The battlefield would be the focus or backdrop for many Attenborough films: World War I in _Young Winston_ (a Churchill biopic) and _In Love and War_ (Ernest Hemingway on the front lines), World War II in _A Bridge Too Far_ and his last feature _Closing the Ring_. He documented the struggle for independence in India with _Gandhi_ and South Africa with _Cry Freedom_ — solidly liberal films of the furrowed middle brow that came to life with Attenborough’s inspired casting of the little-known Ben Kingsley as the Mahatma and the young Denzel Washington as Steve Biko. Attenborough was carrying the epic torch brandished by David Lean, his first director, but without the spectacular visual acuity and understanding of obsessive personalities that elevated Lean’s _The Bridge on the River Kwai_ and _Lawrence of Arabia_ to greatness. Lean was the movie poet, Attenborough the conscientious craftsman. And when deprived of Important Issues like war and death, he often stumbled. His film of _A Chorus Line_ (1985) captured none of the original musical’s urgency; his 1992 _Chaplin_, despite an impressive performance by Robert Downey Jr., was a bloated catalog of the silent clown’s misfortunes with young women. Only the 1993 _Shadowlands_, with Anthony Hopkins as writer C.S. Lewis and Debra Winger as the American poet he loves and tends through illness, found a pleasing balance of tone and emotional texture, of heart and ache. **(READ: Richard Corliss on** [**Debra Winger in Attenborough’s** **_Shadowlands_**](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,163676,00.html)**)** No question, the man’s life was blessed and lucky. The Queen made him a knight in 1976 and a baron in 1993, which earned him a seat in the House of Lords (Labour, of course). And in 1952, as part of the original West End cast of Agatha Christie’s _The Mousetrap_, he received a share of the profits of that play, still running in its 62nd year; he used what was left of that annuity to help finance _Gandhi_. But fate had some heartache in store. Attenborough’s eldest daughter, Jane, along with her daughter and mother-in-law, perished in the South Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004\. Years later he said, “I can talk to people about Jane now, although sometimes I can’t get the words out. I can also see her. I can feel her touch. I can hear her coming into a room.” Attenborough’s co-star in both _The Mousetrap_ and _The Guinea Pig_ was Sheila Sim, his wife since 1945\. In 2012, after being diagnosed with senile dementia, she took residence in Denville Hall, the actors’ home that she and her husband had helped establish. Attenborough, who had outlived a stroke and coma in recent years but was severely incapacitated, moved into Denville Hall with his bride of 69 years. Sim, now 92, survives Attenborough in the shadowlands. As for Lord Dickie, he may be charming a whole new stratum of celebrities. We imagine him rounding up a celestial cast for some new superproduction — but only if they want to. “Entirely up to you, darlings.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/"},"headline":"Remembering Richard Attenborough, the Man Behind Gandhi","datePublished":"2014-08-25T20:01:45.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T09:49:56.969Z","description":"Sir Dickie, as he was widely known and loved, directed many a sprawling epic — but his signal gift was as an actor of bold, powerful and often creepy range","url":"https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/","keywords":["movies","remembrance","Gandhi"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb80eedbc055aef5a/6986a0cce8524bed7560469e/richard-attenborough-011.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb80eedbc055aef5a/6986a0cce8524bed7560469e/richard-attenborough-011.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Richard Attenborough","caption":"Richard Attenborough","creditText":"NBC/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3173294/richard-attenborough-gandhi-remembrance/","name":"Remembering Richard Attenborough, the Man Behind Gandhi"}}]}] ```