John Schlesinger

The New Wave director who defected

Schlesinger is the great emigrant of the British New Wave — the one who took the kitchen-sink realism he helped invent, carried it across the Atlantic, and pointed it at America. That crossing is the whole story. He emerged in the early 1960s as a leading light of the northern English realist school, then made the definitive film about American loneliness while remaining, to his bones, an Englishman looking in from outside. The outsider's eye was not a limitation; it was the instrument. No native could have shot Midnight Cowboy (1969) the way a foreigner did, seeing the country's mythology and its squalor in the same frame.

London to Hollywood

Born in London on February 16, 1926, he was educated at Uppingham and read at Balliol College, Oxford, where he acted with the university dramatic society. He came to features sideways, through documentary and television — Terminus (1961) won a Venice prize and a British Academy Award before he had made a feature at all. Then the northern films arrived in a rush: A Kind of Loving (1962), which took the Golden Bear at Berlin, and Billy Liar (1963). Darling (1965) turned the lens on swinging London and earned him the first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Director. The second, Midnight Cowboy, won — the film took Best Picture and Best Director, one of the earliest mainstream American pictures to deal openly with homosexual relationships, made by one of the rare directors who was himself openly gay. He came out during its production. Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) brought the third nomination.

The long descent

Hollywood kept him — Marathon Man (1976) is a genuinely nasty thriller — but the later career is a cautionary curve. Honky Tonk Freeway (1981) was a ruinous box-office and critical failure, and he never fully recovered the front rank, retreating into handsome television like An Englishman Abroad (1983). He was appointed CBE in 1970, won a Directors Guild of America award in 1969, and was made a BAFTA Fellow in 1996. He died in Palm Springs on July 25, 2003, aged 77.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Schlesinger #71 among all directors at a composite 10.67 across nine films — and few directors in the top hundred are more lopsided. Midnight Cowboy sits at #29 overall (4.62), cited by twelve of our sources, and it alone accounts for nearly half his entire total. Everything else trails at a distance: Sunday, Bloody Sunday at #331 (2.14), Darling, his swinging-London landmark, down at #782 (1.30), A Kind of Loving at #1122 (1.00), Billy Liar lower still at #1904. This is a reputation resting almost wholly on one American picture, with the British New Wave work that built the foundation nearly invisible in the aggregate. The score is blunt about it: Schlesinger is a one-masterpiece director in the ledger, whatever the retrospectives say.

Where to start

Midnight Cowboy, obviously, and there is barely an argument — the loneliness of two hustlers in a city that has no use for them. Then Sunday, Bloody Sunday for the tenderness, and Marathon Man when you want him working the genre machine at full, sadistic tension.